I stood almost in the centre of this huge battlefield in the closing hours of a sombre March day; a light mist was shrouding the crests of the uplands; in the valleys the darkness of night was already falling; for fleeting moments the dying sun, through a breach in the cloud battlements, threw gleams of wintry sunshine over the scene. Nearby were the abandoned ruins of what was once the hamlet of Carency. To the right Vimy Ridge rose slowly to the sky line, flaring up at its northern end into the steeper slopes of "the Pimple." Next came a narrow valley; and then the ridge resumed, turning now almost due west and rising to the height of Notre Dame de Lorette that dominated the landscape. At the base of the sloping terraces that came down from the hill-top the little river Souchez ran, turning north-easterly through the gorge and onward towards Lens. This little stream has known its current dammed by the wedged bodies of dead men; its banks have brimmed with human blood. Beyond the stream at the foot of the hill were the ruins of Ablain St. Nazaire; and nearby all that remained of the sugar factory about which raged an Homeric struggle, noted in the battle bulletins of those days. Up those slopes, now so still in the fading daylight, the French pushed their way day by day and week by week until they planted their flag on its crest. To the south and east they fought their way over Neuville St. Vaast and through the tangled mazes of the Labyrinth. Within a radius of three miles from the place upon which we stood, over one hundred thousand French soldiers who fell in six months’ fighting in 1915 lie buried. These incredible figures were vouched for by an officer of high rank. When the Canadians moved into this area in the winter of 1916-17 they made their homes amidst the wreckage of these battlefields. They took over the trenches along the lower slopes of Vimy Ridge which were reachable only by communication trenches and sunken roads over open ground in plain view in daylight of the Germans who held the crest of the ridge and its western slopes half-way down. Behind this active front they built their secondary positions on the battlegrounds of 1915. Thus the First Division was encamped upon the ground of the Labyrinth; the divisional headquarters were in a German dug-out thirty-nine steps downward from the surface. The reshifting of trenches and dugouts in this neighborhood was not, the Canadians found, to be lightly attempted; for the place was one huge—if unmarked—cemetery where French and Germans by the thousand had been buried where they fell.