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The British literally blasted their way through the German front and rearward positions. Vimy Ridge, dominating the coal fields of Lens, where thousands of French had fallen in the previous year, was captured by the Canadians. The terrific bombardment by British guns during many days had not depressed the Germans' spirit and the advance was hotly contested.
"You wait till winter," Gerhardt told them. He was still splashing in the hole, up to his armpits in muddy water. "You won't get a wash once in three months then. Some of the Tommies told me that when they got their first bath after Vimy, their skins peeled off like a snake's. What are you doing with my trousers, Bruger?" "Hunting for your knife.
It was held in the mess hut, where the bumpy line down the middle of the floor was appropriately called "Vimy Ridge," and the place where the shell hole had been further up "Kennedy Crater." The floor was exceedingly springy just there, but it takes a good deal to "cramp the style" of a F.A.N.Y., and details of this sort only add to the general enjoyment.
An exploration on April 13 of Vimy Ridge, carried by the Canadian troops in a series of historic charges, showed that the British artillery virtually blew off the top of it, and the German stronghold which had resisted all efforts of the French and British during more than two years of war, was finally forced into such a position by high explosives that it could no longer resist infantry charges.
Who can tell how long it will be before the soil about Vimy Ridge will cease to give up its relics? That ground had been searched carefully for everything that might conceivably be put to use again, or be made fit for further service. The British army searches every battlefield so in these days.
In the two weeks following we were at Estari Chic, another Vimy Ridge position. Here we were stationed at the horse lines. While there, an order was issued that we could not buy bread from the civilian population for the reason that our military authorities considered the rations we were getting were sufficient for all our needs.
All night through a German commandant sat in our Intelligence hut with his head bowed on his breast. Every now and then he said: "It is cold! It is cold!" And our men lay out in the captured ground beyond Arras and on the Vimy Ridge, under harassing fire and machine-gun fire, cold, too, in that wild blizzard, with British dead and German dead in the mangled earth about them.
In the Château at Boesinghe, where the moss is growing round the broken doors and the rank weeds fill the garden, with the stagnant Yser hard by; in Ypres, where the rooks nest in the crumbling Cloth Hall and a man's footsteps ring loud and hollow on the silent square; in Vermelles, where the chalky plains stretch bare towards the east, and the bloody Hohenzollern redoubt, with the great squat slag heap beside it, lies silent and ominous; in Guillemont and Guinchy, where the sunken road was stiff with German dead and no two bricks remain on top of one another; on Vimy Ridge, in Bullecourt and Croisilles, in all these places, in all the hundred others, the seed has been sown.
After leaving Lens the Battalion marched right through the centre of the district in which the Vimy Ridge Battles had taken place. The whole region was now desolate and deserted. After a march of twenty-one miles three of the companies marched to their billets at Etrun without the loss of a single man.
The latest British successes had been in the vicinity of Vimy Ridge, which position, believed by the Germans to be impregnable, had been carried by Canadian troops in a single attack. German counter-assaults in this sector had failed to dislodge them, and there they remained secure. The Canadians had launched this attack in April soon after the United States had declared war on Germany.
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