Vimy by Pierre Berton Page A

when the German flares banished the covering gloom. The swampy Zouave Valley on the northern edge of the Canadian sector was a hunting ground for German snipers and gunners. The Canadians called it Death Valley; every man who crossed it did so in full view of the enemy. There were trenches there, too, but these were generally so full of liquid mud that many preferred to chance a quick nocturnal dash above ground. That was a court-martial offence, but many accepted it: anything-an enemy bullet, an army trial – was better than strangling in a river of running slime.
    The Canadians had one advantage. The German defences on the forward slopes of the ridge were also exposed, and the time would come when the Canadian guns would blast them into rubble. But for the moment the Germans had the upper hand. For six and a half miles, every piece of Canadian equipment, every gun, every ammunition dump, every lorry pool, every ration depot-everything that could be blown apart or could give the Germans some inkling of what was to come-had to be concealed in pits or camouflaged or hidden behind folds of ground or copses of foliage.
    The safest places of all were the big subways that went as far back as Neuville St. Vaast and as far forward as the front lines. The Germans knew they were there but had no clear idea of what was going on below ground. The presence of those subways – a dozen of them – some nosing forward inch by inch, foot by foot, dozens of feet below the surface, was the hole card in the game of poker being played out that winter in the shadow of the ridge.
    In this ravaged world, the French villages were little more than heaps of rubble. Arras, three miles to the south, which would give its name to the great spring offensive of which the Vimy attack was a part, was a shell. Restaurants, stores, cafés were battered to bits; the cathedral was a wreck, the railway station a ruin. Ecurie, on the southern border of the Canadian sector, once a haven for French farmers, was no more than a name on a signpost, a flattened expanse of brick dust, bisected by roads that could be used only at night. Neuville St. Vaast, once the White City of Flanders, was a desert of rubbled chalk, its inhabitants long since fled. Someone had erected a bitter sign: THIS WAS NEUVILLE ST. VAAST. Only in the cellars, tunnels, and caves below the surface, which concealed railway terminals, gun positions, and troop facilities, did life go on. The town cemetery was devastated, every monument knocked down, the vaults smashed, the coffins shattered. Beneath the broken trees, skeletons of Frenchmen long gone lay contorted among the clumps of rank grass.
    Souchez and its neighbour, Carency, had been blown away to their foundations by the dreadful struggle of 1915. One foggy morning Bob Brown, a Scottish immigrant from Regina, explored the ruins of Souchez with two others. The town was out of bounds, and Brown was curious to know why. He soon found out: Souchez was a human abattoir. Skeletons lay everywhere. At one point he found a spot where a Frenchman had been standing, rifle in hand, at the moment a building was hit. The man’s skeleton, still clutching the rifle, lay under a heavy beam. A trench dug across the main street and filled with skeletons had yet to be covered over. But the most affecting symbol was the schoolhouse, its roof gone, its walls blown in, but the teacher’s desk still standing with the roll book marking the day the school had been forced to close. Brown tore out the page, pocketed it, and left Souchez to its ghouls and ghosts.
    The ridge and its environs stank of death, and the trenches were sour with it. One of the first things that hit the newly arrived Canadians was the evidence of old and monumental struggles. At the ridge’s northern end, above the Souchez River, a promontory named for the Abbey of Notre Dame de Lorette butted out at right angles. Here the French had managed at fearful cost to wrest the plateau from the Germans,