It was in rain and mist after the battle, while the dead still lay on the field, that I went over the Ridge and along the path of the Canadian charges, wondering how they had passed through the curtains of fire when I saw shrapnel cases so thick that you could step from one to another; wondering how men could survive in the shell-craters and the poor, tumbled trenches in the soft, shell-mashed earth; wondering at the whole business of their being here in France, a veteran army two years after the war had begun. I saw them dripping from the rains, mud-spattered, but in the joy of having made good when their turn came, and in a way that was an exemplification of Canadian character in every detail. "Heap good!" I suppose that big Sioux Indian, looking as natural seated in a trench in his imperturbability as if he were seated in front of his tepee, would have put it. He was seeing a strange business, but high explosives shaking the earth, aeroplanes overhead, machine guns rattling in the war of the Pale Faces he accepted without emotion. With the second battle of Ypres, with St. Eloi, Hooge, Mount Sorrell, and Observatory Ridge, Courcelette had completed the cycle of soldierly experiences for those who bore the Maple Leaf in France of the _Fleur-de-lis_. Officers and men of every walk of life called to a new occupation, a democracy out of the west submitting to discipline had been inured and trained to a new life of risk and comradeship and sacrifice for a cause. It will seem strange to be out of khaki and to go to the office, or the store, or to get up to milk the cows at dawn; "but," as one man said, "we'll manage to adapt ourselves to it without spending nights in a mud hole or asking the neighbors to throw any bombs over the fence in order to make the change gradual." XXIX THE HARVEST OF VILLAGES High and low visibilities--Low Visibility a pro-German--High Visibility and his harvest smile--Thirty villages taken by the British--The 25th of September--The Road of the Entente--Twelve miles of artillery fire--Two villages taken--Combles--British and French meet in a captured village--English stubbornness--Dugouts holding a thousand men--Capture of Thiepval. Always we were talking of the two visibilities, high and low. I thought of them as brothers with the same meteorological parent, one a good and the other an evil genius. Every morning we looked out of doors to see which had the stage. Thus, we might know whether or not the "zero" of an attack set for to-day would be postponed, as it was usually if the sun gave no sign of appearing, though not always; sometimes the staff gave those who tried to guess what was in its mind a surprise.