94
The Ypres Times.
VIMY HEIGHTS TO AUBERS RIDGE AN AFTER-JOURNEY.
By WILFRID EWART.
Vimy is so nearly the Salient that we cannot forbear to print this excellent article by
Capt. Ewart, whose Way of Revelation we heartily commend to the minority who
have not yet read it.)
The battlefield of Vimy bears a likeness to that of the Somme on a small scale but is more
rapidly coming under cultivation. The multitude of stray crosses which, as upon the
greater battlefield, were its characteristic a couple of years ago have given place now to
plough or stubble. Here and there, however, great granite crosses commemorating
whole legions of men stand out impressively against the skyand it seems strange that
on the immortal grounds of conflict every regiment there concerned has not made arrange
ment to commemorate its prowess and its fallen.
Travelling slowly, I pass on along the broad straight road to Lensone of the best
in this part of Franceand am arrived soon at the pinnacle of that abrupt, wall-like
declivity known as the heights of Vimy." There is no such other place upon the old
Western front. On your right, a steep ravine beneath you a plain as flat as our English
fens. Upon this evening the misty sunlight plays queer tricks with the outspread country,
singling out here a brick-red town, there another at a few miles interval with many tall
smoke-stacks and brickfields. It is the threshold of an industrial district, and soon one
realises what the activity of a France determined to resuscitate portends. The hour
for leaving off work had come. Numerous sirens hooted. Train-whistles answered,
goods' trains, engines, trucks seemed everywhere moving, loading, unloading. There
seemed no end to the railway lines one had to cross, to the barriers, to the red flags waved.
Are you acquainted with the appearance of a great mining or manufacturing town at the
hour of close down It was like this in Lens. Masses of people thronged the road
way, labourers chiefly, bicyclists, builders, officials, railwaymenalso women and girls.
One saw rows of French Government huts in the distance, while on the outskirts of the
town towards Lille whole new streets of jerry-built but comfortable-looking hutments
had sprung up. Among the ruins, among the naked facades of red-brick walls and the
open spaces of rubble, shops of a gaudy doll's-house exterior winked at you, and estaminets
any number of them. Young women and girls, elegantly attired in white or pink
elegant as even the provincial bourgeois are in Francestrolled arm-in-arm laughingly
against this crude background. War grinned out of the immediate past and on every
side, but this made no difference to the 1920 flapper who eyed the young mechanics
in blue overalls and got off as frequently as in the Bois de Boulogne.
It was the same the whole way up the Western front, from this point as far as
Bailleul and Armentières. Hazebrouck hives. In Armentières you still have the basis
of a prosperous town, whole streets standing in fabric as they originally stood, whereas
Lens is razed to the ground and must be built anew. There was nothing terrible about
either the one or the otherall sense of foregoing conflict or of present desolation being
lost in the fascinating interest of this tremendous activity. At Bailleul it was different.
Here, too, you had activity, you had people, you had the beginnings of reconstruction.
But you had also the stagnancy of utter ruin andmemories. It is in truth a town
blotted out, a place which you could not recognise and no single part of which you could
recognise as its former self. Here stood a city reminiscent of St. Omer to-day, a city of
cobbled streets and squaresuncomfortable enough to the feet but to the eye attractive
of houses rich in mellowing, faded colours, of old red roof-tops, picturesque churches,
all breathing the slow somnolent life of Flanders. But of this not one atom remains and
not even a suggestion. You may see here, as at Ypres, the war at its worst ameliorated
by the minimum of reconstruction nevertheless, the completeness of it will not strike
home as had you known it before April, 1918.
