Vimy by Pierre Berton

Souchez to the north and the Scarpe four miles to the south. This would be the Canadian objective, but that wasn’t yet clear in December and wouldn’t be until early February, when the entire corps was squeezed into this four-mile sector. The ground between was shaped like a great pie section because the Canadian lines didn’t parallel the ridge but veered away from it at an angle. At the southern boundary, the Canadians were four thousand yards from the crest, at the north, a mere seven hundred. Between lay No Man’s Land, a spectral world of shell holes and old bones. Down its midriff a ragged line of gigantic craters marked the sites of earlier mine explosions in the failed struggles to capture the ridge. Some were so vast that Canadian sentries and snipers held one lip while the Germans squatted on the opposite rim.
    Beyond the crater line-in places no more than a few dozen yards away-three parallel rows of German trenches zigzagged along the lower slopes of the ridge, protected by forty-foot rolls of heavy steel wire with razor-sharp barbs and machine-gun nests in steel and concrete pillboxes.
    Behind these forward defences rose the dark bulk of the escarpment, which more than one new arrival likened to that of a gigantic whale. Its highest point, Hill 145, rose 470 feet above the plain to form the mammal’s hump. A mile to the north, on the edge of the Canadian sector, was a small knoll, poking up like a pimple on the whale’s snout and called, naturally enough, the Pimple.
    A mile south of Hill 145 was another hill near whose slopes was sprawled a farm that was no longer a farm – La Folie. Two miles south of that, straddling the crest near the right of the corps boundary, was a village that was no longer a village-Thélus. Directly in front of these ruins, high on the forward slope, stood the fragments of Les Tilleuls (the Linden Trees), a hamlet that was no longer a hamlet, clustered in a grove that was no longer a grove. These dead communities added to the starkness of the scene and hinted at the intensity of the struggles that had gone before. Veined by trenches, honeycombed with tunnels, bristling with gun emplacements, crawling with snipers, this formidable rampart had been in German hands since October 1914. The Germans intended it to stay that way.
    From their vantage points on the crest, they had an uninterrupted view for miles in every direction. Behind them, among the forests that still cloaked the steeper eastern slopes and hid their big guns, lay small, red-roofed villages not yet entirely shattered by shellfire: Givenchy-en-Gohelle, in the shadow of the Pimple, Vimy and Petit Vimy directly to the east, and, to the south, the village of Farbus, sheltered by Farbus Wood. Far to the rear lay the spires and slag heaps of Lens, the heart of France’s coal mining region, now denied to the Allies. Here was life, movement, and colour: carts and lorries clattering along the Lens-Arras road, freight trains snorting past on a rail line that once was French, peasants toiling in the fields, troops moving about in broad daylight, smoke pouring from the big stacks at Lens- and all this spectacle shielded from the soldiers of the King, observable only by a handful of brave men in captive balloons and by the young knights of the Royal Flying Corps.
    To the west, the Germans looked down on a dead world, stretching back for more than six miles, in striking contrast to the scene behind. Back of the line of craters they could see the blurred contours of the Canadian forward trenches and behind these two more lines-the support and reserve trenches. Farther back, parallel with the trench lines, were three deeply sunk roads, and beyond these the Arras-Souchez highway.
    Bisecting this lifeless, underground domain were the great communication trenches, which sheltered the troops moving up to the front at night; one was four miles long. For nothing moved above ground by day, and even the nights were hazardous, especially