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Looking out from the Vimy Ridge six weeks ago, and driving thence through Arras across the Drocourt-Queant line to Douai and Valenciennes, I was in the very heart of that triumphant stand of the Third and First Armies round Arras which really determined the fate of the German attack.

The Vimy Ridge from the west is a stiffish climb.  On the east also it drops steeply above Petit Vimy and Vimy, while on the south and south-east it rises so imperceptibly from the Arras road that the legend which describes the Commander-in-Chief, approaching it from that side, as asking of the officers assembled to meet him after the victory—­“And where is this ridge that you say you have taken?” seems almost a reasonable tale.  But to east and west there is no doubt about it.  One climbs up the side overlooking Ablain St. Nazaire through shell-holes and blurred trenches, over snags of wire, and round the edges of craters, till on the top one takes breath on the wide plateau where stands the Canadian monument to those who fell in the glorious fight of April 9th, 1917, and whence the eye sweeps that wide northern and eastern plain, towards Lille on the one side and Douai on the other, which to our war-beaten and weary soldiers, looking out upon it when the ridge at last was theirs, was almost as new and strange a world as the Pacific was to its first European beholders.

Westwards across the valley whence our troops stormed the hill, rises the Bouvigny Wood, and the long, blood-stained ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, where I stood just before the battle, in 1917.  To the north we are looking through the horizon shadows to La Bassee, Bailleul, and the Salient.  Immediately below the hill, in the same direction, lie the ruin heaps of Lens, and of the mining towns surrounding it; while behind us the ground slopes south and south-east to Arras and the Scarpe.

It is a tremendous position.  That even the merest outsider can see.  In old days the hill must have been a pleasant rambling ground for the tired workers of the coal-mining districts.  Then the war-blast at its fiercest passed over it.  To-day in its renewed solitude, its sacred peace, it represents one of the master points of the war, bought and held by a sacrifice of life and youth, the thought of which holds one’s heart in grip, as one stands there, trying to gather in the meaning of the scene.  Not one short year ago it was in the very centre of the struggle.  If Arras and Vimy had not held, things would have been grave indeed.  Had they been captured, says the official report of the Third Army, “our main lateral communications—­Amiens—­Doullens—­St. Pol—­St. Omer—­would have been seriously threatened if not cut.”  The Germans were determined to have them, and they fought for them with a desperate courage.  Three assault divisions were to have carried the Vimy Ridge, while other divisions were to have captured Arras and the line of the Scarpe.