THE OBSERVER, SUNDAY, JULY 22, 1917. 79

THINGS SEEN: FROM FLANDERS TO ALSACE

IV.

Only as much might be said of the following day and every other. I must not dwell on nine-tenths of the things that tempt the pen. On a bright Sunday morning, when little French girls were all in white and our Catholic soldiers were marching to attend Mass in French churches, we set out for scenes as renowned as any in the war. A valley with grassy downs like Box Hill, only barer. The lofty blanched ruin of a great church with tall stiff fragments of wall perilously balanced like crude and aimless pinnacles. Around the dumps of rubbish and lowly shells of brick that were houses. This was Ablain St. Nazaire. The height above is no less a place than Notre Dame de Lorette. We breezy top is seamed with trenches amongst the overgrowth. Mouldering equipment lies all about and here and there the bones of men. Below, the industrial plain spreads away beyond the horizon. We see Lens, only four miles off. Near by we feel rather than see Loos of desperate memory. A hundred colliery villages with their tail pitgear and slag pyramids dot these faint green levels stretching like a still sea into the distant mist and smoke which hold Lille. For we are on the very rim of Flanders, looking over now into what our foreheads called simply the Low Countries. No wonder that when army more than two years ago stormed this crest and saw the view they shouted with exultation and thought that they would end the war in their next stride.

These thumb-nail drawings I begin to perceive would take more room if continued than this one article can give. Let us sketch smaller and, as it were, on the nail of the little finger. The dun height over there is Vimy of resounding name. Even from here it looks rough, scarred, full of holes and burrows. It is slightly lower than where we are standing, but was a wicked barrier [?] across the straight road to Lille and Ghent. Our big batteries are flashing and slamming in the hollow. British shells are skying their heavy traffic over Vimy and roaring like railway trains. They will dump into the Hindenburg line. We can now go a bit of the way with them and see where they fall. We pass what was Slouehez. Slab, smooth destruction—they have cleared up much bricky rubbish and are still shovelling—with jags of broken timbers, wheels, gates, while the wrecked boilers and girders of the sugar refinery sprawl lonely. Long familiar with the large maps of all this, you had imagined the Souche river to be a stream of respectable width. You find it a busy brook which you could almost jump.

Then, leaving the green ground for the battered, while the guns are louder and louder, you scramble up the Vimy Ridge itself, from trench to trench, from ledge, into the mid-nightmare of [?] this livid. stiffened, gouged, and tortured [?] the spectral at high noon. You clamber over [?]iless scaly hummocks. By paths like ribs you you wind amongst innumerable pits, greenish, or red, or iridescent, most witch-like and foul. The hard knobs and funnels of the cold moon cannot be so strange. When you see what has happened here to the obliterated