Vimy by Pierre Berton Page B

and the evidence of that struggle for what they then called La Butte de la Mort (the Hill of Death) was everywhere. When Will Bird, with his sensitive writer’s perception, first saw the carnage on the Lorette Spur, it made his flesh crawl: he had never before seen so many grinning skulls. Here was a maze of old trenches and ditches littered with the garbage of war-broken rifles, frayed equipment, rusting bayonets, hundreds of bombs, tangles of barbed wire, puddles of filth, and everywhere rotting uniforms, some French blue, others German grey, tattered sacks now, holding their own consignments of bones.
    Farther south lay the Labyrinth, another city of the dead, a bewildering network of caves, tunnels, trenches, and dugouts, circulating and radiating in all directions. Here again French and Germans burrowing beneath the ground had blown each other up and fought hand to hand with knives and clubs. French equipment, human bones, wire, and scores of homemade bombs-jam tins filled with scrap-iron, nails, and stones-lay everywhere. In the Aux Ruitz cave, it was said, there were so many dead that one tunnel had to be walled up.
    Through this tangle of decaying artifacts the souvenir hunters picked their way, insensible to the heart-breaking evidence of human waste. As Private Donald Fraser, a six-foot Scot from Calgary, confided to his journal, “rifling the dead used to be considered in pre-war times a ghoulish business but over here the dead are of no account, they are scattered all over the battle area.” An inveterate collector, Fraser spent many of his spare hours cutting the buttons off the tunics of corpses.
    There were subtler hints, however, of those earlier battles, certain nocturnal sounds-mere whispers between the crump of the guns – that could send a shiver up the spine of those who had been hardened by a long acquaintance with the dead. In the French cemetery at Villers-au-Bois, thousands of temporary crosses marked the resting places of those bodies that had been awarded a formal burial. On each of these crosses, the French had placed a small tri-coloured metal triangle as makeshift identification. In the night, when a chill breeze sighed through this city of the dead, the men in the trenches could hear the eerie clink-clink-clink of these thousands of tin triangles, a reminder of the vast and ghostly army that had preceded them.
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    For the Germans, most private soldiers felt no emotion other than a mild curiosity. The only Germans they really saw were either corpses or prisoners; the others kept their heads down or appeared as shadowy figures in the night raids that were a feature of the winter stalemate. The prisoners looked weak and weedy, but then prisoners generally do. Andrew Macphail thought them “cancerously yellow,” and Claude Williams thought they were “a very bowed, sickly looking aggregation.” But much of that was wishful thinking.
    The men opposite were Prussians and Bavarians, The latter were considered the better fighters, probably because the Prussian division included men of other nationalities, many of them dissident and willing to surrender. Their main complaint was the poor quality and scarcity of their clothing. The Allied blockade had done its work. Some men had no underwear. Shirts were no longer wool but thin cotton; some were woven of wood fibre. Prisoners told stories of starvation in the enemy lines, one Pole complaining that he’d had nothing but bread, jam, and tea for weeks, which was unusual. The Canadians, who were really not much better off, rose to the occasion. One of the Nova Scotians decided to taunt the Germans by holding up a loaf of bread on a bayonet to show how well his side was living. Almost instantly a German bayonet appeared on the far side of No Man’s Land. On it were stuck two loaves of bread. Between the opposing sides there existed a rough camaraderie born of common misery. When the Canadians first reached Vimy Ridge, a sign was hoisted above the