Immediately below us I could make out scars like earthquake cracks running across the meadows—­the front trenches.  Both armies were buried like moles in these furrows.  The country was spread out before us, like a map, with occasionally the black contour of a coal mound rising against the green, or a deserted shaft-head.  I was gazing at the famous battlefield of Lens.  Villages, woods, whose names came back to me as the major repeated them, lay like cloud shadows on the sunny plain, and the faintest shadow of all, far to the eastward, was Lens itself.  I marked it by a single white tower.  And suddenly another white tower, loftier than the first, had risen up!  But even as I stared its substance seemed to change, to dissolve, and the tower was no longer to be seen.  Not until then did I realize that a monster shell had burst beside the trenches in front of the city.  Occasionally after that there came to my ears the muffed report of some hidden gun, and a ball like a powder-puff lay lightly on the plain, and vanished.  But even the presence of these, oddly enough, did not rob the landscape of its air of Sunday peace.

We ate our sandwiches and drank our bottle of white wine in a sheltered cut of the road that runs up that other ridge which the French gained at such an appalling price, Notre Dame de Lorette, while the major described to me some features of the Lens battle, in which he had taken part.  I discovered incidentally that he had been severely wounded at the Somme.  Though he had been a soldier all his life, and a good soldier, his true passion was painting, and he drew my attention to the rare greens and silver-greys of the stones above us, steeped in sunlight—­all that remained of the little church of Notre Dame—­more beautiful, more significant, perhaps, as a ruin.  It reminded the major of the Turners he had admired in his youth.  After lunch we lingered in the cemetery, where the graves and vaults had been harrowed by shells; the trenches ran right through them.  And here, in this desecrated resting-place of the village dead, where the shattered gravestones were mingled with barbed wire, death-dealing fragments of iron, and rusting stick-bombs that had failed to explode, was a wooden cross, on which was rudely written the name of Hans Siebert.  Mouldering at the foot of the cross was a grey woollen German tunic from which the buttons had been cut.

We kept the road to the top, for Notre Dame de Lorette is as steep as Vimy.  There we looked upon the panorama of the Lens battle-field once more, and started down the eastern slope, an apparently smooth expanse covered now with prairie grasses, in reality a labyrinth of deep ditches, dugouts, and pits; gruesome remnants of the battle lay half-concealed under the grass.  We walked slowly, making desperate leaps over the trenches, sometimes perforce going through them, treading gingerly on the “duck board” at the bottom.  We stumbled over stick-bombs and unexploded shells.  No plough can be put here—­the only solution for the land for years to come is forest.  Just before we gained the road at the bottom, where the car was awaiting us, we were startled by the sudden flight of a covey of partridges.