“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.