Part 18 (1/2)

I stood around while we were getting ready to start back to the cars, and one of the officers was with me.

”How often do you get a sh.e.l.l right inside the pit here?” I asked him. ”A fair hit, I mean?”

”Oh, I don't know!” he said, slowly. He looked around. ”You know that hole you were singing in just now?”

I nodded. I had guessed that it had been made by a sh.e.l.l.

”Well, that's the result of a Boche sh.e.l.l,” he said. ”If you'd come yesterday we'd have had to find another place for your concert!”

”Oh--is that so!” I said.

”Aye,” he said, and grinned. ”We didn't tell you before, Harry, because we didn't want you to feel nervous, or anything like that, while you were singing. But it was obliging of Fritz--now wasn't it?

Think of having him take all the trouble to dig out a fine theater for us that way!”

”It was obliging of him, to be sure,” I said, rather dryly.

”That's what we said,” said the officer. ”Why, as soon as I saw the hole that sh.e.l.l had made, I said to Campbell: 'By Jove--there's the very place for Harry Lauder's concert to-morrow!' And he agreed with me!”

Now it was time for handshaking and good-bys. I said farewell all around, and wished good luck to that brave battery, so cunningly hidden away in its pit. There was a great deal of cheery shouting and waving of hands as we went off. And in two minutes the battery was out of sight--even though we knew exactly where it was!

We made our way slowly back, through the lengthening shadows, over the sh.e.l.l-pitted ground. The motor cars were waiting, and Johnson, too. Everything was s.h.i.+pshape and ready for a new start, and we climbed in.

As we drove off I looked back at Vimy Ridge. And I continued to gaze at it for a long time. No longer did it disappoint me. No longer did I regard it as an insignificant hillock. All that feeling that had come to me with my first sight of it had been banished by my introduction to the famous ridge itself.

It had spoken to me eloquently, despite the muteness of the myriad tongues it had. It had graven deep into my heart the realization of its true place in history.

An excrescence in a flat country--a little hump of ground! That is all there is to Vimy Ridge. Aye! It does not stand so high above the ground of Flanders as would the books that will be written about it in the future, were you to pile them all up together when the last one of them is printed! But what a monument it is to bravery and to sacrifice--to all that is best in this human race of ours!

No human hands have ever reared such a monument as that ridge is and will be. There some of the greatest deeds in history were done--some of the n.o.blest acts that there is record of performed. There men lived and died gloriously in their brief moment of climax--the moment for which, all unknowing, all their lives before that day of battle had been lived.

I took off my cap as I looked back, with a gesture and a thought of deep and solemn reverence. And so I said good-by to Vimy Ridge, and to the brave men I had known there--living and dead. For I felt that I had come to know some of the dead as well as the living.

CHAPTER XVIII

”You'll see another phase of the front now, Harry,” said Captain G.o.dfrey, as I turned my eyes to the front once more.

”What's the next stop?” I asked.

”We're heading for a rest billet behind the lines. There'll be lots of men there who are just out of the trenches. It's a ghastly strain for even the best and most seasoned troops--this work in the trenches. So, after a battalion has been in for a certain length of time, it's pulled out and sent back to a rest billet.”

”What do they do there?” I asked.

”Well, they don't loaf--there's none of that in the British army, these days! But it's paradise, after the trenches. For one thing there isn't the constant danger there is up front. The men aren't under steady fire. Of course, there's always the chance of a bomb dropping raid by a Taube or a Fokker. The men get a chance to clean up. They get baths, and their clothes are cleaned and disinfected.

They get rid of the cooties--you know what they are?”

I could guess. The plague of vermin in the trenches is one of the minor horrors of war.

”They do a lot of drilling,” G.o.dfrey went on. ”Except for those times in the rest billets, regiments might get a bit slack. In the trenches, you see, the routine is strict, but it's different. Men are much more on their own. There aren't any inspections of kit and all that sort of thing--not for neatness, anyway.

”And it's a good thing for soldiers to be neat. It helps discipline.