In my simple way I asked him a direct question:
"Do you think your men can hold on to the craters, sir?"
"Certainly. The position cannot be retaken overground. We hold it strongly."
As he spoke an orderly came into his billet (a small farmhouse), saluted, and handed him a pink slip, which was a telephone message. I watched him read it, and saw the sudden pallor of his face, and noticed how the room shook with the constant reverberation of distant gun-fire. A big bombardment was in progress over Vimy way.
"Excuse me," said the colonel; "things seem to be happening. I must go at once."
He went through the window, leaping the sill, and a look of bad tidings went with him.
His men had been blown out of the craters.
A staff officer sat in the brigade office, and when the acting-brigadier had gone raised his head and looked across to me.
"I am a critic of these affairs," he said. "They seem to me too expensive. But I'm here to do what I am told."
We did not regain the Vimy craters until a year afterward, when the Canadians and Scottish captured all the Vimy Ridge in a great assault.
The winter of discontent had passed. Summer had come with a wealth of beauty in the fields of France this side the belt of blasted earth. The grass was a tapestry of flowers, and tits and warblers and the golden oriole were making music in the woods. At dusk the nightingale sang as though no war were near its love, and at broad noonday a million larks rose above the tall wheat with a great high chorus of glad notes.
Among the British armies there was hope again, immense faith that believed once more in an ending to the war. Verdun had been saved. The enemy had been slaughtered. His reserves were thin and hard to get (so said Intelligence) and the British, stronger than they had ever been, in men, and guns, and shells, and aircraft, and all material of war, were going to be launched in a great offensive. No more trench warfare. No more dying in ditches. Out into the open, with an Army of Pursuit (Rawlinson's) and a quick break-through. It was to be "The Great Push." The last battles were to be fought before the year died again, though many men would die before that time.
Up in the salient something happened to make men question the weakness of the enemy, but the news did not spread very far and there was a lot to do elsewhere, on the Somme, where the salient seemed a long way off. It was the Canadians to whom it happened, and it was an ugly thing.