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Updated: May 1, 2025
The strong, attractive presence of an Army Commander, whose name will be for ever linked with that of the battle of the Vimy ridge, surrounded by a group of distinguished officers; a long table, and a too brief stay; conversation that carries for me the thrill of the actual thing, close by, though it may not differ very much from wartalk at home: these are the chief impressions that remain.
In places the attack has shaken loose from the trenches and was being delivered along the lines of the old Napoleonic strategy. The British captures of Vimy and later of Givenchy were looked on as victories of the utmost importance, equal to the storming by the Canadians of the Vimy Ridge.
So, too, the French capture of the Vimy heights, which had been announced in May that year, proved something of a fairy tale, and in April 1917 our line ran barely east of Souchez, Neuville, and the Labyrinth. It was held by Allenby's Third Army, which joined Gough's Fifth just south of Arras, and by Horne's First, which extended Allenby's left from Lens northwards to La Bassee.
Last time I met the most wounded man who ever came out of France alive, it was my turn to be in hospital. He came to visit me there, and told me that he'd been all through the Vimy racket and was again going back. "But how did you manage to get into the game again?" I asked. "I thought the doctors wouldn't pass you." He laughed slily. "I didn't ask the doctors.
It was a hideous territory, this Black Country between Lens and Hulluch. From the flat country below the distant ridges of Notre Dame de Lorette and Vimy there rose a number of high black cones made by the refuse of the coal-mines, which were called Fosses.
The roughness of the going helped me to do that, for it took all a man's wits and faculties to grope his way along the path we were following now. Indeed, it was no path at all that led us to the Pimple the topmost point of Vimy Ridge, which changed hands half a dozen times in the few minutes of bloody fighting that had gone on here during the great attack.
An utterance which for tragic sincerity and passion may well compare with the letter of an English officer I printed at the end of England's Effort. On they go, into the snow and the mist, the small sturdy soldiers, bound northwards for those great and victorious attacks on the Craonne plateau, and the Chemin des Dames, which were to follow so close on our own British victory on the Vimy Ridge.
April 8 Austria declares severance of diplomatic relations with United States. April 9 British defeat Germans at Vimy Ridge and take 6,000 prisoners; United States seizes fourteen Austrian interned ships. April 20 Turkey severs diplomatic relations with the U.S. April 28 Congress passes selective service act for raising of army of 500,000; Guatemala severs diplomatic relations with Germany.
If Whitman had been through the campaign across the narrow straits, if Ypres, Vimy, and Cambrai had been in his own experience, he could have added little to Drum Taps. For there is nothing that is new in war. It is only the campaign that is new, and the men who are young. Yet all has happened before. But each young soldier in a new campaign feels that his experience is strangely personal.
We'd pushed the Hun back frae a' that country I'd visited I'd seen Vimy Ridge, and Peronne, and a' the other places. I told what I'd seen. I told the way the Hun worked. And I spoke for the Liberty Loans and the other drives they were making to raise money in America the Red Cross, the Y. M. C. A., the Salvation Army, the Knights of Columbus, and a score of others.
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