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By liberating an immense number of French troops of the Tenth Army and
a mass of artillery from this part of the front, we had the good
fortune to be of great service to France at a time when she needed
many men and guns to repel the assault upon Verdun.
Some of her finest troops--men who had fought in many battles and had
held the trenches with most dogged courage--were here in this sector
of the western front, and many batteries of heavy and light artillery
had been in these positions since the early months of the war. It was,
therefore, giving a new and formidable strength to the defense of
Verdun when British troops replaced them at the time the enemy made
his great attack.
The French went away from this part of their battlefront with regret
and emotion. To them it was sacred ground, this line from the long
ridge of Notre Dame de Lorette, past Arras, the old capital of Artois,
to Hebuterne, where it linked up with the British army already on the
Somme. Every field here was a graveyard of their heroic dead.


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