Watching these women with their strained, anxious faces--women who cut each thread in the shell with the accuracy of the expert--you could see the lips of the woman murmuring, and needed no confession from her that she was silently praying for the man who would use this weapon to defend her beloved France, her aged mother and her little child. When the beast is slain and the Potsdam gang tried and executed for their crimes, and the boys come home with trumpets and banners, the ovations will be for the soldiers; but after the soldiers have had their parade and their honour and their ovation on the first day of the triumph, there should be a second great parade, in which, while the soldiers stand on the streets and observe, and the merchants and working men and the professional classes stand as spectators, down the street shall march the munition girls, who fashioned the weapons with which the soldiers slew the common enemy. For while the boys at the front have defended liberty the girls at home have armed the soldiers. Neither one without the other could have made the world safe for democracy. Through the imagination these women have a right, while they toil, to watch the shell complete their work. The smith who forges the chain for the ship's anchor has a right to exult when he looks out through his imagination upon the great boat held firm by his chain in the hour when the storm threatened to hurl the craft upon the rocks. The inventor has a right to say: "That granary full of wheat is mine; I invented the reaper." The physician has a right to rejoice over the battle and victory over the youth whose life was saved by the surgeon's skill. Not otherwise, the munition girl has a right when the long day of battle is over to say: "I safeguarded that cottage; I lifted a shield above that little child; I built a wall against the cathedral and the gallery and the homes of yonder city." For American girls of vision there is nothing that they so much desire as the immediate condemnation by our Government of 10,000 luxury-producing plants in this country, which should immediately be taken over by our Government for munition purposes, and before the daybreak of the first morning there would be ten million American girls standing before the doors, trying to break their way in to obtain a chance to fashion the shells that would protect American boys in danger at the front. 5. The Wolves' Den on Vimy Ridge The bloodiest battle of 1917 was fought on the slopes of Vimy Ridge. That ridge is seven and a half miles long and is shaped like a dog's hind leg. Lifted up to an elevation of several hundred feet, the hill not only commands an outlook upon the German lines eastward, but protects the great plains that slope westward towards the English Channel.