March 1918; in every copse hereabouts there lie Canadian dead. From Roye southward to the Oise we passed through a countryside which was fought over, foot by foot twice last year—to say nothing of the battles of earlier campaigns; everywhere there were ruin, desolation and the marks of death. After crossing the river the ruins of war diminished, but not until we passed Senlis—where the marks of the beast left by the Hun high tide in 1914 are still to be seen—did we leave them behind; and so came back to Paris by the old Roman road over which the legions marched to Flanders nearly 2,000 years ago. *CHAPTER II* *THE BATTLEGROUNDS OF THE SOUCHEZ* The storming of Vimy Ridge on that wintry April morning two years ago was neither in its actual achievement nor in its military consequences the greatest feat of the Canadian Expeditionary Force; but it holds, and it may continue to hold, a unique place in the Canadian consciousness. It was the first cleancut definite stroke by the Canadian Corps acting as a recognized unit of the greater British army; and there was in the achievement something dramatic and climacteric which riveted the attention of all watchers of the long-continuing duel between the great armies along the western front. For Vimy, before it had any Canadian associations, was a tragic name! It was the western-most bastion of German power in Europe. Against its gently rising slopes the fierce French valor that had conquered the valley of the Souchez and its bordering uplands, had dashed itself in vain; the hillside was white with the unburied bones of the men who won the ridge in October, 1915, for a day, only to be swept back by a German counter-attack of overwhelming force. The Germans proudly boasted the impregnability of a position which protected their strangle-hold upon the coalfields of Lens and gave them a jumping-off place for a further adventure westward to the Channel ports. When the greater portion of the Ridge was stormed in a fierce sustained assault by the Canadian troops on the morning of April 9, 1917, the reverberation of the achievement went round the world; and its echoes will long persist. Vimy Ridge—a swell of land five miles in length which rises so gradually on the southern slopes that one hardly realizes the elevation until he stands upon the crest and notes how the ground falls sheer away to the eastward—marks the eastern rim of one of the bloodiest battlegrounds of the whole war. Many Canadians have but the haziest knowledge of the battles that were fought hereabouts in the early summer of 1915; but the flower of the highly trained armies with which France and Germany entered the war lie buried here.