Yet I have contrived to visit in person many corners of the battlefield of Ypres, sometimes a day or two after the great contest had raged itself out. On the _chaussée_ by the Yser Canal, north of Ypres, I have seen the humble graves, many of them nameless, in which the poor French victims of the first great gas attack were laid to rest, their rusting rifles and blood-stained uniform close at hand. I have stood in the emplacements of our guns about Ypres amid the putrefying carcasses of horses and piles of empty shell-cases. I have walked through trenches dug across the battlefield where, through fissures in the ground, one yet might see the dead, buried as they died, in uniform. I have looked upon the hill of St. Eloi--the Mound of Death--that tumulus of glory of the Princess Pat.’s. I have seen the brown and scarred top of Hill 60, where in the yawning craters rent by our mines 2,000 Britons and Germans are yet lying awaiting the Last Trump, where shells and bullets have stripped the trees of their last leaf, and where chlorine gas has stained the herbage yellow. I have talked with the Generals who directed the fight, who spoke eagerly of its strategy and tactics, and of the undying heroism of our men. I have spoken with the humble privates, whose only recollection of this classic struggle is of long marches over the hard and galling _pavé_ of the Belgian roads, of such an inferno of shell-fire as no man ever dreamt of before, of hours spent, hungry and thirsty, with nerves benumbed, in narrow trenches where comrades cried sharply “Oh!” and “Ah!” as fragments of shell or bullets struck them, where dead men sprawled around, where wounded sighed and died, where one fired and loaded and fired and “stuck it,” because, avowedly, one wouldn’t go back for no bloody German--in reality, because one was British. I have been among the Canadians who went through the gas horror with a gallantry that made the Empire ring. I have talked with soldiers to whom, but five days out from England, the hell of fire that swept the salient night and day was their first taste of war, and with veterans fresh from the fight on whose breasts the discoloured medal ribbons spoke of former service in the field. From all I have seen myself and all I have heard from others, my mind has focussed so sublime a spectacle of heroism, of pluck undaunted by adversity, of resourcefulness never foiled by confusion, that I have felt impelled to try my hand at painting the picture of that battle which history will set down as one of the crucial struggles of the war. [Illustration: MAP TO ILLUSTRATE THE SECOND BATTLE OF YPRES. (_From “The Times,” by kind permission._)]