British soldiers called it Torr Top, an old English name for a hill summit. The Belgian survey maps gave it a number: 62, for the metres above sea level at the crest. The hill itself is modest - a wooded rise of only 30 metres above the surrounding plateau - but in the flat terrain east of Ypres, 30 metres mattered. From Torr Top a man could see clear across the Salient to the spires of Ypres three kilometres west. Anyone holding the hill could direct artillery onto everything in the bowl beyond. Anyone losing it could be observed and shelled at leisure. Through three years of the Ypres Salient, both sides understood that the high ground would have to be paid for in lives, and both sides paid.

The Canadian 3rd Division had inherited these trenches in early June 1916. They did not have time to learn them. From 2 to 6 June the Germans poured fire onto Mount Sorrel and Hill 62 in the heaviest bombardment Canadian troops had yet experienced. Entire trench sections were obliterated. Men were buried alive in the collapsing earth, and some of those men were heard for hours by their comrades, who could not dig fast enough to reach them. The 3rd Division's commander, Major-General Malcolm Mercer, walked the line that morning to inspect his battalions and was killed by shellfire - the most senior Canadian to die in action during the war. When the German infantry came on, the survivors fought until overwhelmed. Then the Germans detonated four mines under the Canadian lines and took the rest of the high ground. The 1st Division would have to take it back.

Lieutenant-General Julian Byng, the new Corps commander, gave the counter-attack to Major-General Arthur Currie - the citizen-soldier who would become Canada's most famous WWI general. Currie planned the attack with care that had not characterised the earlier disasters at St Eloi, where 1,375 Canadians had died in 13 days, some of them killed by their own artillery. This time the gunners would do better. For three days the British and Canadian batteries shelled the captured German positions. At 1:30 a.m. on 13 June 1916, in the dark, the Canadian infantry climbed the slopes of Mount Sorrel and Hill 62. They took the heights by morning. The cost over the month was 8,400 men. The line was restored. The Germans never again threatened Ypres from this direction during the war.

After the Armistice, the Imperial War Graves Commission granted Canada eight sites in France and Belgium for national memorials. A competition in 1922 chose Toronto sculptor Walter Allward's design - the soaring twin white pylons that now stand at Vimy Ridge. The committee had originally intended Allward's monument to go on Hill 62, because General Currie believed that this was where the Canadian Corps had first attacked and first won. But Vimy Ridge was decided to be the more dramatic site, and Allward's masterpiece went there. Hill 62 received instead the standard memorial: a 13-tonne cube of white-grey granite from Stanstead, Quebec, carved with wreaths and inscribed in English and French. 'Honour to the Canadians who on the fields of Flanders and France fought in the cause of the Allies with sacrifice and devotion.' Eight of these granite blocks mark the eight sites. This is one of them.

A visitor reaching Hill 62 today walks up the Canadalaan - Canada Lane - through three terraced gardens that climb the hillside. At the summit the granite block sits in a circle of grass, ringed by flagstone. The view is the point. Ypres rises three kilometres west, its rebuilt Cloth Hall standing on the ground where the original was shelled to powder. Mount Sorrel - the real Mount Sorrel, 850 metres southeast of where the memorial stands - can be seen on a clear day. The inscription on the block names this place as Mount Sorrel, which is geographically incorrect; the granite sits on Hill 62 itself, on Torr Top. The Canadians who took this ground in June 1916 would not have minded the slip. They knew the difference between names and the difference between hills. They had walked both, in the dark, with rifles in their hands, in an attack that took back ground their friends had been buried in alive.