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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Private Peat, by Harold R. Peat
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: Private Peat
+
+
+Author: Harold R. Peat
+
+
+
+Release Date: September 12, 2005  [eBook #16685]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PRIVATE PEAT***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Rick Niles, Josephine Paolucci, and the Project
+Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (https://www.pgdp.net/)
+
+
+
+Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
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+      or
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+
+
+
+
+
+PRIVATE PEAT
+
+by
+
+HAROLD R. PEAT
+
+Ex-Third Battalion First Canadian Contingent
+
+Profusely Illustrated with Photographic Reproductions Taken at the Front.
+Also with Scenes from the Photo-Play of the Same Name Released by Famous
+Players--Lasky Corporation
+
+New York
+Grosset & Dunlap
+Publishers
+The Bobbs-Merrill Company
+
+1917
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Private Peat
+Still smiling though his right arm is useless]
+
+
+
+
+  _To the boys who will never come back_
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+In this record of my experiences as a private in the great war I have tried
+to put the emphasis on the things that seemed to me important. It is true I
+set out to write a book of smiles, but the seriousness of it all came back
+to me and crept into my pages. Yet I hope, along with the grimness and the
+humor, I have been able to say some words of cheer and comfort to those in
+the United States who are sending their husbands, their sons and brothers
+into this mighty conflict. The book, unsatisfactory as it is to me now that
+it is finished, at least holds my honest and long considered opinions. It
+was not written until I could view my experiences objectively, until I was
+sure in my own mind that the judgments I had formed were sane and sound. I
+give it to the public now, hoping that something new will be found in it,
+despite the many personal narratives that have gone before, and confident
+that out of that public the many friends I have made while lecturing over
+the country will look on it with a lenient and a kindly eye.
+
+To my wife, who has helped me greatly and who has been my inspiration in
+this, as in all else, I should have inscribed this volume had she not urged
+the present dedication. But she prefers it as it is, for "the boys who will
+never come back" gave themselves for her and for all sister-women the world
+over.
+
+H.R.P.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+Chapter
+
+      I THE CALL--TO ARMS
+
+     II IN THE OLD COUNTRY
+
+    III BACK TO CANADA--I DON'T THINK
+
+     IV ARE WE DOWNHEARTED? NO!
+
+      V UNDER FIRE
+
+     VI THE MAD MAJOR
+
+    VII WHO STARTED THE WAR?
+
+   VIII "AND OUT OF EVIL THERE SHALL COME THAT WHICH IS GOOD"
+
+     IX ALL FUSSED UP AND NO PLACE TO GO
+
+      X HELLO! SKY-PILOT!
+
+     XI VIVE LA FRANCE ET AL BELGE!
+
+    XII CANADIANS--THAT'S ALL
+
+   XIII TEARS AND NO CHEERS
+
+    XIV "THE BEST O' LUCK--AND GIVE 'EM HELL!"
+
+     XV OUT OF IT
+
+    XVI GERMAN TERMINOLOGICAL INEXACTITUDES
+
+   XVII THE LAST CHAPTER
+
+        THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF A SOLDIER WHILE ON ACTIVE SERVICE
+
+        SOME THINGS THAT WE OUGHT AND OUGHT NOT TO SEND
+
+
+
+
+
+PRIVATE PEAT
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE CALL--TO ARMS
+
+
+"Well," said old Bill, "I know what war is ... I've been through it with
+the Boers, and here's one chicken they'll not catch to go through this
+one."
+
+Ken Mitchell stirred his cup of tea thoughtfully. "If I was old enough,
+boys," said he, "I'd go. Look at young Gordon McLellan; he's only seventeen
+and he's enlisted."
+
+That got me. It was then that I made up my mind I was going whether it
+lasted three months, as they said it would, or five years, as I thought it
+would, knowing a little bit of the geography and history of the country we
+were up against.
+
+We were all sitting round the supper table at Mrs. Harrison's in Syndicate
+Avenue, Edmonton, Alberta. War had been declared ten days before, and there
+had been a call for twelve hundred men from our city. Six hundred were
+already with the colors.
+
+Now, to throw up a nice prosperous business and take a chance at something
+you're not sure of getting into after all, is some risk, and quite an
+undertaking as well. But I had lived at the McLellens' for years and knew
+young Gordon and his affairs so well that I thought if he could tackle it,
+there was no reason why I shouldn't.
+
+"Well, Bill, I'm game to go, if you will," I said. Bill had just declared
+his intention rather positively, so I was a bit surprised when he replied
+in his old familiar drawl:
+
+"All right, but you'll have to pass the doctor first. I'm pretty sure I can
+get by, but I'm not so certain about you."
+
+Ken Mitchell looked up at that and, smiling at me, said, "I can imagine
+almost anything in this world, but I can't imagine Peat a soldier."
+
+"Well, we'll see about that, Ken," I replied, and with that the supper came
+to an end.
+
+That evening Bill and I went over to the One-Hundred-and-First Barracks,
+but there was nothing doing, as word had just come from Ottawa to stop
+recruiting. It was on the twenty-second of August, 1914, before the office
+was opened again, and on that day we took another shot at our luck.
+
+The doctor gave me the "once over" while Bill stood outside.
+
+"One inch too small around the chest," was the verdict.
+
+"Oh, Doc, have a heart!"
+
+"No," he said, "we have too many men now to be taking a little midget like
+you." That was disappointment number two. I walked out and reported to
+Bill, and I need not say that that loyal friend did not try to pass without
+me.
+
+That night--August twenty-second--I slept very little. I had made up my
+mind that I was going to the war, and go I would, chest or no chest. Before
+morning I had evolved many plans and adopted one. I counted on my
+appearance to put me through. I am short and slight. I'm dark and
+curly-haired. I can pass for a Frenchman, an American, a Belgian; or at a
+pinch a Jew.
+
+I had my story and my plan ready when the next day I set out to have
+another try. At twelve-thirty I was seated on Major Farquarhson's veranda
+where I would meet him and see him alone when he came home to lunch.
+
+"Excuse me, Doctor," I said when he appeared, "but I'm sure you would pass
+me if you only knew my circumstances."
+
+"Well?" snapped the major.
+
+"You see, sir, my two brothers have been killed by the Germans in Belgium,
+and my mother and sisters are over there. I _must_ go over to avenge them."
+
+I shivered; I quaked in my shoes. Would the major speak to me in French? I
+did not then know as much as _Bon jour_.
+
+But luck was with me. To my great relief Major Farquarhson replied, as he
+walked into the house, "Report to me this afternoon; I will pass you."
+
+August 28, 1914, saw old Bill--Bill Ravenscroft--and me enlisted for the
+trouble.
+
+A few days later Bill voiced the opinion of the majority of the soldiers
+when he said, "Oh, this bloomin' war will be over in three months." Not
+alone was this Bill's opinion, or that of the men only, but the opinion of
+the people of Canada, the opinion of the people of the whole British
+Empire.
+
+And right here there lies a wrong that should be righted. From the days of
+our childhood, in school and out, we are taught what WE can do, and not
+what the other fellow can do. This belief in our own strength and this
+ignorance of our neighbor's follows us through manhood, aye, and to the
+grave.
+
+It was this over-confidence which brought only thirty-three thousand
+Canadian men to the mobilization camp at Valcartier, in answer to the first
+call to arms, instead of the one hundred thousand there should have been.
+
+Not many days passed before we boarded the train at Edmonton for our
+journey to Valcartier. The first feeling of pride came over me, and I am
+sure over all the boys on that eventful Thursday night, August 27, 1914,
+when thousands of people, friends and neighbors, lined the roadside as we
+marched to the station.
+
+Only one or two of us wore the khaki uniform; the rest were in their oldest
+and poorest duds. A haphazard, motley, rummy crowd, we might have been
+classed for anything but soldiers. At least, we gathered this from remarks
+we overheard as we marched silently along to the waiting troop-train.
+
+Strangely enough no one was crying. Every one was cheered. Little did
+hundreds of those women, those mothers, dream that this was the last look
+they would have at their loved ones. Men were cheering; women were waving.
+Weeping was yet to come.
+
+On that same August night, not only from Edmonton, but from every city and
+town in Canada men were marching on their way to Valcartier.
+
+We traveled fast, and without event of importance. There were enthusiastic
+receptions at each town that we passed through. There was Melville and
+there was Rivers, and there was Waterous, where the townsfolk declared the
+day a public holiday, and Chapelou in Northern Ontario, where we had our
+first parade of the trip. There was a tremendous crowd to meet us here, a
+great concourse of people to welcome these stalwarts of the West. We lined
+up in as good formation as possible, and our sergeant, who was very proud
+of himself and of us--mostly himself--majestically called us to attention.
+
+"From the left, number!" he gave the command. Such a feat, of course, is an
+impossibility.
+
+"From the right, Sergeant," yelled old Bill.
+
+"No," answered the sergeant, "from the left." The crowd roared and the
+sergeant raved. Finally our captain straightened us out, but the sergeant
+to this day has never forgotten the incident.
+
+North Bay passed, then Ottawa, Montreal, and at last we arrived at
+Valcartier. So far the life of a soldier had been anything but a pleasant
+one. My body was black and blue from lying on the hard boards, and I was
+eager, as was every other man, to leave the train at once; but as our camp
+was not quite ready we had to stay in the cars another night.
+
+It was a relief, I assure you, when on the morning of September first we
+marched into Valcartier. Such a sight: tents everywhere one looked; all
+around little white marquees. I said to Bill, "Is this the regular training
+ground?" To my surprise he informed me that this great camp had been
+organized within the last two weeks.
+
+I marveled at this for I did not believe we had a man in Canada with the
+organizing ability to get a camp of this size in such splendid shape in so
+short a time. We were finally settled in our quarters and told that we
+were to be known as the Ninth Battalion, One-Hundred-and-First Edmonton
+Fusiliers.
+
+The second day we were in camp the bugle sounded the assembly. Of course I
+did not know an "assembly" from a mess call, but the others ran for the
+parade ground and so I followed.
+
+Gee! what a mob! There was a big man sitting on a horse. Bill said he was
+the colonel. He made a speech to us. He told us we were fine men.
+
+"You are a fine body of men," said he ... "but we are unorganized, and we
+have no non-commissioned officers."
+
+I whispered to Bill, "What's a non-commissioned officer?"
+
+Bill looked to see if I really meant it. "A sergeant, a corporal--anything
+but a private," he replied.
+
+"Will all the men who have had former military experience fall out,"
+commanded the colonel; "the rest of you go back to quarters."
+
+"Have I had any former military experience, Bill?" I was eager for
+anything.
+
+"Sure you have," said Bill. "We'll just stay here and maybe we'll be made
+sergeants."
+
+About six hundred of us stayed! But, believe me, if they had all had as
+much military experience as I, we wouldn't have been soldiers yet. When the
+adjutant came around, he gave me a look as much as to say: "That kid
+certainly has got a lot of nerve." He offered to make Bill a corporal, but
+as that would have transferred him from D Company to F Company he declined
+rather than leave me.
+
+This will give you some idea of the kind of organization or
+non-organization when the First Contingent Canadians was formed. Not only
+in our own battalion but nearly anywhere in the regiment almost anybody
+could have been a non-commissioned officer--certainly anybody that had
+looks and the nerve to tell the adjutant that he had had former military
+experience.
+
+It was not very long before we began to realize that soldiering, after all,
+was no snap. There was the deuce of a lot to learn, and the deuce of a lot
+to do.
+
+To the rookie one of the most interesting things are the bugle calls. The
+first call, naturally, that the new soldier learns is "the cook-house," and
+possibly the second is the mail-call. The call that annoyed me most at
+first was "reveille." I had been used to getting up at nine o'clock in the
+morning; rising now at five-thirty wasn't any picnic. This, especially when
+it took a fellow half the night to get warm, because all we had under us
+was Mother Earth, one blanket and a waterproof.
+
+It was the second day at camp that we started in to work good and hard.
+Reveille at five-thirty A.M.; from six to seven Swedish exercise,
+then one hour for breakfast when we got tea, pork and beans, and a slice of
+bread. From eight to twelve saw us forming fours and on the right form
+companies. From twelve to half past one more pork and beans, bread and tea.
+Rifle practise, at the butts, followed until five-thirty, and ... yes, it
+did ... pork and beans, bread and tea appeared once more.
+
+Neither officers nor non-coms knew very much at the start, but they were a
+bunch of good scouts. And we were all very enthusiastic, there is no doubt
+about that. Soon we began to realize that if we would put our shoulders to
+the wheel and work hard we would certainly see service overseas.
+
+[Illustration: ©_Famous Players--Lasky Corporation. Scene from the
+Photo-Play_
+
+THE SONS OF DEMOCRACY.]
+
+[Illustration: SOUVENIRS BROUGHT BACK FROM "OVER THERE."
+
+The enemy calls the Canadian a "Souvenir Hunter." It must be remembered the
+author is a Canadian.]
+
+As a private soldier and no matter how humble my opinion may be, I must
+give the greatest praise and credit to the organizer and founder of Camp
+Valcartier, at that time Colonel Sir Sam Hughes ... the then minister of
+militia for Canada. We had about three miles of continuous rifle range; and
+good ranges they were, considering they were got together in less than two
+weeks. I will admit that the roads leading to the ranges were nothing to
+brag about, yet, taking it all in all, even they were pretty good.
+
+By this time the majority of us had received our uniforms and our badges,
+and had been given a number, and instructed to mark this number on
+everything we had. Mine was 18535.
+
+We had no "wet" canteens at Valcartier, so we were a very sober camp. Each
+battalion had a shower bath, and there was no excuse for any man to be
+dirty. Even at that it was not very long before those little "somethings"
+which are no respecters of persons, be he private, non-com, commissioned
+officer or general, found their way into the camp. I'll never forget the
+first gray-back I found on me. I cried like a baby, and old Bill
+sympathized with me, saying in consoling tones that I'd soon get used to
+them. Bill knew.
+
+For amusement at Valcartier, we had free shows and pay shows, also moving
+pictures. The pay show got to be so amusing that we made a bonfire out of
+it one bright September night, and found it more entertaining as a
+conflagration than it ever had been as an entertainment. At all events,
+that was how one of the boys of the Fifteenth Battalion put it.
+
+The second week in camp we were inoculated, and again examined for overseas
+service. Through some very fine work, I escaped the examination, but could
+not get out of the inoculation. We were promised three shots in the arm,
+but after the first I resolved that one was more than enough for me. German
+bullets could not be worse, I thought, and when I got one I didn't change
+my mind.
+
+As the days wore on we grew more and more enthusiastic. Already rumors were
+spreading that we would be leaving "any time now" for France. The
+excitement certainly told on some of the boys. In my regiment no less than
+nine, I guess they were ex-homesteaders, went "nutty." One chap, I recall,
+killed hundreds of Germans on the bloody battle-fields of Valcartier. The
+surgeon assured us the mania was temporary.
+
+We were pretty thoroughly equipped by the end of the third week, when we
+were given puttees instead of leggings. It was sure funny the way some of
+the boys looked when they first put them on, for many of them got the lower
+part of the leg much bigger than the upper part, but of course that might
+happen to any one who had never seen puttees before.
+
+There was considerable grumbling about these same puttees, because, at
+first, they were undoubtedly very uncomfortable. However, before many days
+the majority of us were ready to vote for puttees permanently, as they
+proved warmer, a greater support to the leg on long marches and more nearly
+waterproof than their more aristocratic brother leggings.
+
+It was during the third week of camp life that we had our first review. We
+gave the salute to the Duke of Connaught, who was accompanied by Sir Sam
+Hughes. After this review, we were told that we might expect to leave for
+France at two hours' notice.
+
+The following days we spent on the rifle ranges and in making fake
+departures. I wrote home to my friends more than once that "we were leaving
+for the front to-day," but when the next day arrived we were still leaving.
+I sent my mother six telegrams on six different days to say that I would
+start for France within the next hour, but at the end of it we were still
+to be found in the same old camp.
+
+Finally, on the first day of October, 1914, our regiment boarded the _S.S.
+Zeeland_ at Quebec. The comment of the people looking on was that they had
+never seen a finer body of men. And that was about right. Physically we
+were perfect; morally, we were as good as the next, and, taken all in all,
+there were no better shots on earth. Equipped to the minute, keen as
+hunting dogs, we were "it." Surely a wonderful change this month's training
+had wrought. And I say again if the credit for it all must be given to any
+one man, that man is Sir Sam Hughes.
+
+In a few hours we were steaming down the St. Lawrence, and the next day we
+slipped into Gaspé Bay on the eastern coast of Canada, where we joined the
+other transports. Here thirty-two ships with as many thousand men aboard
+them were gathered together, all impatiently waiting the order to dash
+across the Atlantic.
+
+We did not have to wait very long. On Sunday, October the fourth, at three
+o'clock in the afternoon, we steamed slowly out of the harbor in three long
+lines. Each ship was about a quarter of a mile from her companion ahead or
+behind, and guarded on each side by cruisers. I have memorized the names of
+the transports, and at this time it is interesting to know that very few of
+them have been sunk by the German submarines.
+
+The protecting cruisers were: _H.M.S. Eclipse_, _Diana_, _Charybdis_,
+_Glory_, _Talbot_ and _Lancaster_. The transports were in Line Number One:
+_S.S. Manatic_, _Ruthenian_, _Bermudian_, _Alaunia_, _Irvenia_,
+_Scandinavian_, _Sicilia_, _Montzuma_, _Lapland_, _Casandia_;
+
+Line Number Two: _Carribean_, _Athenia_, _Royal Edward_, _Franconia_,
+_Canada_, _Monmouth_, _Manitou_, _Tyrolia_, _Tunissian_, _Laurentic_,
+_Milwaukee_; Line Number Three: _The Scotian_, _Arcadian_, _Zeeland_,
+_Corinthian_, _Virginian_, _Andania_, _Saxonia_, _Grampian_, _Laconia_,
+_Montreal_, _The Royal George_.
+
+All the way across the Atlantic we were in sight of each other and of the
+cruisers. Personally, the scene thrilled me through and through. Here was
+the demonstrated fact that we, an unmilitary people, with a small
+population to draw on, had made a world record in sending the greatest
+armada that had ever sailed from one port to another in the history of man.
+Personally, I felt very proud because of the thirty-three thousand soldiers
+on these boats only seventeen per cent. were born Canadians; five per cent.
+Americans, and the other seventy-eight were made up of English, Irish and
+Scotch residing in Canada at the outbreak of the war.
+
+There were no exciting scenes on the way over, except when some wild and
+woolly Canadian tried to jump overboard because of seasickness. We were a
+long time crossing, because the fastest transport had to cut her speed down
+to that of the slowest, and the voyage was anything but a pleasant one.
+When we finally steamed into Plymouth, the gray-backs outnumbered the
+soldiers by many thousands. The invasion of England!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+IN THE OLD COUNTRY
+
+
+We were the first of the British Colonial soldiers to come to the aid of
+the Motherland. Judging from the wonderful reception given us, it was easy
+to see that the people were very pleased at our coming, to put it mildly.
+
+My first night on English soil I shall never forget. After three weeks on
+ship coming over, we were all pretty stiff. The night we landed in England
+we marched many miles, and as a result my feet were awfully sore. So, when
+we finally arrived at Salisbury Plain and were immediately ordered to march
+across the Plain another ten miles to Pond Farm, I knew I shouldn't be able
+to do it, and confided my troubles to Bill and another fellow named
+Laughlin. After we had gone about four miles we came to an inviting
+haystack; it was too much for us and all three of us slipped out of line,
+but before we could reach the stack we were caught by Major Anderson.
+Bully old major! He volunteered to carry my pack. In turn, I carried his
+greatcoat, and we continued the march.
+
+It wasn't very long before another haystack came in view and again we
+couldn't resist the temptation. This time we made our goal, and there we
+slept until early morning. Thus I passed my first night on English soil.
+Two days later we landed in camp, after visiting Devizes, Lavington and
+Salisbury City on the way. Laughlin wore the major's coat, and by this
+device got through where otherwise we should have been pinched.
+
+After the first two days in England it began to rain, and it kept on
+raining all the time we were there. The people round about the country told
+us that never before in their lives had they seen such rains, but this must
+be characteristic of people the world over. In Western Canada when
+strangers come and it gets really cold, we tell the same story of never
+having seen the like before.
+
+We hadn't been in camp long when they began to issue passes to us. The
+native-born Englishmen were the first to get leave, and the Canadians next.
+At last my turn came, but unfortunately I had to go alone. Personally, I
+think the English people made too big a fuss over us. The receptions we got
+at every turn of the way were stupendous; and I am certain a majority of
+the men had more money than was really good for them. As one young Canadian
+boy said afterward: "Why, they treated us as if we were little tin gods."
+
+But from a military view-point, we, the boys of the First Canadian
+Division, did not make such a tremendous hit with British officials. It was
+not long before they even criticized us openly, and looking at it from a
+distance I do not blame them. Never in their lives had they seen soldiers
+like us. They had been used to the fine, well-disciplined, good-looking
+English Tommy. Of course I will admit that we were good-looking all right,
+but as far as discipline was concerned, we did not even know it by name.
+The military authorities could not understand how it was that a major or a
+captain and a private could go on leave together, eat together and in
+general chum around together.
+
+The English people, I dare say, had read a lot about the wild and woolly
+West, but now in many instances they had it brought right home to
+Piccadilly and the Strand. With a band of young Canadians on pass, I
+assisted once in giving Nelson's Monument in Trafalgar Square the "once
+over" with a monocle in my left eye. A few hours later this same crowd
+commandeered a dago's hurdy-gurdy, and it was sure funny to see three
+Canadian Highlanders turning this hand organ in Piccadilly Circus.
+
+The folks, of course, took all these little pranks good-naturedly; and, as
+a Canadian, I can not speak too highly of the treatment handed out to us by
+the Britishers. If there ever was a possibility before this war of Canada's
+breaking away from the Motherland, such a possibility has been shot to the
+winds. No two peoples could be more closely allied than we of the West and
+they of this tiny but magnificent island.
+
+The little training we had had in Canada was good, as far as it went, and
+we had devoured it all. But the most vital part of a soldier's up-bringing
+was absolutely forgotten by our officers--discipline! As I've said before,
+as far as discipline was concerned, we were a joke. Certainly we were
+looked upon as such by the Imperial officers.
+
+In one of the leading British weeklies there appeared a series of comments
+reflecting rather seriously on our discipline. One of the most humorous yet
+caustic, it seemed to me, was of an English soldier on guard at a post just
+outside of London. His instructions were to stop all who approached. In the
+darkness it was impossible for him to distinguish one person from another.
+Before long he heard footsteps coming toward him:
+
+"Halt! Who goes there?" demanded the sentry.
+
+"The Irish Fusiliers," was the answer.
+
+"Pass, Irish Fusiliers; all's well."
+
+Before long some more steps sounded....
+
+"Halt! Who goes there?"
+
+"The London Regiment."
+
+"Pass, Londons; all's well."
+
+"Halt! Who goes there?"
+
+"Hic ... mind your own damn business...."
+
+"Pass, Canadians; all's well."
+
+At a parade, one bright November morning, when we were at Salisbury, a
+certain brigadier-general from Ontario, since killed in action, while
+reviewing the soldiers of a particular battalion, made a unique speech to
+the boys when he said:
+
+"Lads, the king and Lord Kitchener and all the big-bugs are coming down to
+review us to-day, and for once in your lives, men, I want to see you act
+like real soldiers. When they get here, for the love o' Mike, don't call me
+Bill ... and, for God's sake, don't chew tobacco in the ranks."
+
+There is no doubt about it, the authorities probably looked on us as a
+bunch of good fellows, but that's about all.
+
+While still in England, all the men of the First Canadian Contingent were
+issued a cloth lapelette or small shoulder strap; the infantry, blue; the
+cavalry, yellow with two narrow blue stripes; the artillery, scarlet, and
+the medical corps, maroon. I was told that these lapelettes were given to
+distinguish us from other contingents. To-day there are only a few hundred
+men entitled to wear what now amounts to a badge distinction. Personally, I
+feel prouder of my blue lapelette than of anything else I possess in the
+world.
+
+The so-called training that we were supposed to have in England was not
+really any training at all. The rain was almost continuous, we were
+constantly being moved from one camp to another, and training, as training
+is understood to-day, was out of the question.
+
+As I have said, our first camp in England was Pond Farm. It was well named.
+Later we moved to Sling Plantation. However, it was at Pond Farm we had
+some of our most grueling experiences. Many a night, owing to the awful
+rains, we would have to move our tents sometimes in the middle of the
+night. If any minister of the gospel--except our chaplain--had been
+standing around on these occasions he might well have thought from the
+sulphurous perfume of the air that every soldier was doomed to everlasting
+Hades. But, after all, "cussing" is only a small part of a soldier's life,
+and who would not swear under such extraordinary circumstances? Again, we
+have authority for it. It is a soldier's commandment on active service--the
+third commandment--and here is how it reads:
+
+"Thou shalt not swear unless under extraordinary circumstances."
+
+An "extraordinary circumstance" can be defined as moving your tent in the
+middle of the night under a downpour of rain, seeing your comrade shot, or
+getting coal oil in your tea. As a matter of fact, all minor discomforts in
+the army are counted as "extraordinary circumstances."
+
+Despite the weather conditions, and the fact that we did very little
+training, the men in our battalion were enthusiastic and did their best to
+keep fit. However, we all went to pieces when we were told, early in
+December, that it was a cinch our battalion would never get to France as a
+unit.
+
+I'll never forget the day our captain broke the news to us. The tears ran
+down his cheeks, and he wasn't the only man who cried. We were almost
+broken-hearted to know we were to be divided, because Captain Parkes (now
+Colonel) was a real and genuine fellow. He had taught us all to love him.
+For instance, when after a long march we would come in with our feet
+blistered, he would not detail a sergeant to look after us. He would,
+himself, kneel down on the muddy floor and bathe our feet. If at any time
+we were "strapped" and wanted a one-pound note, we always knew where to go
+for it. It was always Captain Parkes, and he never asked for an I.O.U.
+either. On the gloomy wet nights of the winter he would play games with
+us, and it was common to hear the boys remark that if we should ever get to
+France as a unit, and our captain got out in front, it would not be one man
+who would rescue him, but the whole company.
+
+The day at Pond's Farm was more than a sad one when the old Ninth was made
+into a Reserve Battalion. The men were so greatly discouraged and the
+sergeants so grouchy that at times it became almost humorous.
+
+One day, in late December, while at the butts, we were shooting at six
+hundred yards, with Sergeant Jones in command of the platoon. We had
+targets from Number One to Number Twenty inclusive, and the men were
+numbered accordingly. At this distance we all did fairly well, except
+Number One, who missed completely. For the sake of Number One the sergeant
+moved us down to four hundred yards, and at this distance every man got a
+bull's eye except Number One. He was off the target altogether. Our
+sergeant, after a few very pungent remarks, commanded the section to move
+to one hundred yards. Here again each one of us had a bull to his credit
+but Number One. Again he had missed, and again we moved, this time to fifty
+yards.
+
+At fifty yards I can not begin to describe the look on the sergeant's
+face--to say that his eyes, nose and mouth were twitching is putting it
+mildly. Nevertheless, Number One missed. Then, something that never
+happened before on a rifle range on this earth electrified us all. Sergeant
+Jones shouted at the top of his voice: "Number One, attention! Fix bayonet!
+Charge! That's the only d----d hope you've got."
+
+Disappointments were frequent enough in camp. Take the case of the Fifth
+Western Cavalry, who could sport the honor of their full title on their
+shoulder straps in bold yellow letters. It was they who had to leave horses
+behind and travel to France to fight in what they termed "mere" infantry.
+To this day we know them as the "Disappointed Fifth." There was also the
+Strathcona Horse of Winnipeg who were doomed to disappointment and much
+foot-slogging with their horses left behind.
+
+Among those made into reserve units we of the Ninth had for companions the
+Sixth, Eleventh, Twelfth and Seventeenth Battalions. It was obvious that
+somebody had to be kept in reserve, and we were the unlucky dogs. We cursed
+our fate, but that didn't mend matters. We had nothing for it but to trust
+to a better fortune which should draft us into a battalion going soon to
+the fighting front.
+
+The First Brigade consisted of men of the First, Second, Third and Fourth
+Battalions of Infantry. All of these battalions came from Ontario. The
+Second Brigade was made up of men from the West, including Winnipeg,
+Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary and Vancouver. They were in the Fifth, Seventh,
+Eighth and Tenth Battalions, all infantry.
+
+The Third Brigade was commonly known as the Highland Brigade and was made
+up of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Battalions. This
+last brigade included such splendid old regiments as the Forty-Eighth
+Highlanders of Toronto, the Ninety-First Highlanders of Hamilton and
+Vancouver, and the Black Watch of Montreal. There were also some of the far
+eastern men in this brigade.
+
+After all this rearrangement had been made, it was only a few days till
+the rumor flew about that the battalions might leave for France at any time
+now. It seemed to us poor devils of the old Ninth that everything was going
+wrong. The unit lying next to us, the Seventeenth Battalion, was
+quarantined with that terrible disease, cerebro-spinal-meningitis. For a
+few days we buried our lads by the dozen. Speaking for myself, my nerves
+were absolutely unstrung, and I am sure that most of the men were in the
+same condition. It can be easily understood then that when drafts were
+asked for, to bring up the regiments leaving for France to full strength,
+there was a mad scramble to get away.
+
+Without even passing the surgeon, I finally drifted into the Third
+Battalion, ordinarily known as the "Dirty Third." This battalion was made
+up of the Queen's Own, the Bodyguards and Grenadier Regiments of Toronto.
+
+I landed in on a Sunday afternoon about three o'clock and was immediately
+told by the quartermaster that we were leaving for France in a few hours.
+He told me that I needed a complete change of equipment. At this news I
+rejoiced, because so far we had all worn, in our battalion, the leather
+harness known as the "Oliver torture." I knew that the active service, or
+web, equipment could not be worse.
+
+The rush for equipment issue was like a mêlée on the front line after a
+charge, as I found out later on. There were some three hundred men newly
+drafted into the Third Battalion; there were some three hours in which we
+had to get our equipment and learn to adjust it. As it was, many of the
+extreme greenhorn type marched away garbed in most sketchy fashion. Some
+had parts of their equipment in bags; others utilized their pockets as
+holders for unexplained, and to them inexplicable, parts of the fighting
+kit.
+
+Another of our trials was the new army boot. In Canada we had been issued a
+light-weight, tan-colored shoe, more practicable for dress purposes than
+for active service. Now we had the heavy English ammunition boot. This is
+of strong--the strongest--black leather. The soles are half-inch, and they
+are reenforced by an array of hobnails. These again are supplemented by
+tickety-tacks, steel or iron headed nails with the head half-moon shape.
+Each heel is outlined with an iron "horse shoe." Until the leather has been
+softened and molded with much rubbing and the unending use of dubbing, I
+would say, mildly, that these boots are not of the easiest.
+
+Our departure for France was thrilling in its contrasts. Before setting out
+we cleaned camp, and then we had a fine speech from our new commander,
+Colonel Rennie, of Toronto, of whom much was to be heard in the hard days
+to come.
+
+We slipped out of the camp in silence and utter darkness. Troops were being
+moved through England and into France with the utmost secrecy. We dare not
+sing as we marched; we dare not speak to a neighbor. On and on, it seemed
+endless, through mud and water and mud again. At times it reached to our
+knees as we plowed our way to the railway, where trains with drawn blinds
+awaited us.
+
+Before we were half through our march a terrific electrical storm broke
+over us; the thunder roared and the lightning split the sky open as though
+Heaven itself were making a protest against war.
+
+We finally embarked on _His Majesty's Transport Glasgow_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+BACK TO CANADA--I DON'T THINK
+
+
+It was seven in the evening before we were ready to start. At that hour we
+quietly slipped our anchor and glided out of the harbor. We all thought we
+would be in France before midnight. The trip across the Channel in ordinary
+times is not often more than two and a half hours. We had no bunks allotted
+to us, and didn't think that any would be needed. We all lay around in any
+old place, and in any old attitude. I, for one, devoted most of the time
+during that evening to learning the art of putting my equipment together.
+The majority of the boys were at the old familiar game, poker.
+
+We had not been on this transport very long when we had our first
+introduction to bully beef and biscuits. Bully beef is known to civilians
+the world over as corned beef, and to the new Sammy as "red horse." But
+even bully beef and biscuits aren't so bad, and our thoughts were not so
+much on what we were getting to eat as on when we were getting to France.
+
+As the hours went by we more and more eagerly craned our necks over the
+deck rails, trying to pierce the darkness of the deep for one flash of
+light that might mean France hard ahead. But nothing happened, and one
+after another the watchers dropped off to sleep.
+
+When dawn broke we woke and rubbed our eyes. We were mystified and not a
+little mortified. Where was France? There was nothing but water, blue as
+heaven itself, around us. We were still at sea, and still going strong.
+
+The hours of that day dragged out to an interminable length. No one spoke
+of the matter--the question of land in sight was not discussed. Some of the
+boys went back to poker. Others decided to be seasick, and subsequently
+wished for a storm and the consequent wrecking of the ship, with a watery
+death as relief.
+
+Bully beef and biscuits at noon; bully beef and biscuits at our evening
+meal, and no sight of land. Night came. The more hopeful of us did the
+craning business over the deck rails for a few more hours. The
+pessimistic, deciding France had ceased to be, returned to poker. We slept.
+We woke. We watched the sun rise--over the sea!
+
+About noon that day after the ration of bully beef had gone its round and
+we, in consequence, were feeling pretty blue, there was a group of us
+standing around doing nothing. Suddenly Tom King came rushing up in great
+excitement. He had had an idea.
+
+"Say, you fellows, I don't care a darn what any of you may say, I believe
+these blinkin' English are sick of us and are sending us back to Canada!"
+
+No such luck. Before sundown that evening we sighted land. We steamed
+slowly into the port of St. ----. This is a large seaport town near the Bay
+of Biscay, on the southwest coast of France. Why in the world they wanted
+to take us all the way round there, I don't know. I was told that we were
+among the first British troops to be landed at this port.
+
+As soon as we disembarked from the boats that evening, before we left the
+docks, we were issued goat-skin coats. The odor which issued from them
+made us believe that they, at least in some former incarnation, had
+belonged to another little animal family known as the skunk. Ugh! The
+novelty of these coats occupied us for a while, and if a sergeant or a
+comrade addressed us we answered in "goat talk": "Ba-a-a, ba-a-a-a...."
+
+It was apparent that the secrecy of troop transportation which held in
+England held also in France. The populace could not have known of our
+coming, for there was no scene, nor was there a reception. We were to meet
+with that later on.
+
+Here, however, we did meet the French "fag." When Tommy gets one puff of
+this article of combustion he never wants another. It is one puff too many.
+Of course our first race was to buy cigarettes--but, napoo!
+
+Before entraining we were all shocked by the dreadful tidings that the
+transport carrying the Forty-Eighth Highlanders had been sunk. This news
+was soon discredited and the truth was established when the Forty-Eighth
+came up the line in a few days and reported that they had heard _we_, the
+Third, had been sunk and all drowned. Apparently it was a part of certain
+propaganda to publish that all transports of British soldiers were
+destroyed. So far none had even been attacked.
+
+The evening of our arrival we boarded the little trains. To our surprise
+and to our intense disgust, we had not even the passenger coaches provided
+in England and Canada. I say little trains, because they were little, and
+in addition the coaches were not coaches, but box cars. Painted on the side
+of the "wheeled box" was "_Huit chevaux par ordinaire_."
+
+But these are not ordinary times, so instead of eight horses they put
+forty-eight of us boys in each car. Forty-eight boys all my size might have
+worked out well enough, though in full fighting trim even I was quite a
+husky, but the average Canadian soldier is a much bigger man. Take into
+consideration what we have to carry. There is our entrenching tool which we
+use for digging in. To look at it the uninitiated might well think that it
+was a toy, but, as I learned afterward, when bullets are flying around you
+by the thousand you can get into the ground with even a toy--or less.
+
+There is our pack. A soldier's pack on active service in the British Army
+is supposed to weigh approximately forty-five pounds, but when the average
+Tommy lands in France his pack weighs nearer seventy-five pounds than
+forty-five. Tommy does not feel like throwing away that extra pair of
+boots, two or three suits of extra underwear, and so many of the little
+things sent from home or given him just before setting out for France. As a
+consequence when he arrives in France he carries a very heavy load, though
+it does not stay heavy for long. After being on a route march or two the
+weight will mysteriously disappear. Then Tommy carries one pair of boots,
+one suit of underwear, one shirt, one pair of socks, and they are all on
+him.
+
+There is a mess tin to cook in, wash in, shave in and do all manner of
+things with. There is the haversack in which is stuffed a three-day
+emergency ration. The emergency ration of the early days of the war was
+much different from the emergency ration of to-day. These rations are
+intended to be used only in an emergency, and, believe me, only in an
+emergency are they used. There was compressed beef--compressed air, we
+called it; there were Oxo cubes and there was tea. In addition there were
+a few hardtacks.
+
+Then there is the bandoleer, and the soldier on active service in this war
+never carries less than one hundred and fifty rounds of ammunition at any
+one time, and sometimes he carries much more. As a final, there is our
+rifle and bayonet. At that time of which I am speaking we Canadians carried
+the now famous, or infamous, Ross rifle. This weighed nine and
+three-quarters pounds.
+
+With all this equipment to a man, and forty-eight men to each small box
+car, it doesn't demand much imagination to picture our journey. We could
+not sit down. If we attempted it we sat on some one, and then there was a
+howl. We tried all manner of positions, all sorts of schemes. In the
+daytime we sought the roof of the cars, or leaned far out the open doors.
+If the country had not been so lovely, and if all our experiences had not
+been new and out of the ordinary, there would have been more grousing.
+
+The second day on the train--we were three days and three nights--while
+passing through a city near Rouen, we had a glimpse of our first wounded
+French soldiers. It seemed as though war came home to a lot of us then for
+the first time. I was fairly sick at heart when I saw one Frenchman with
+both arms bound up, and with blood pouring over his face. I understood that
+these wounded men were coming back from the battle of Soissons. From the
+glimpses we caught of them in their train they seemed a funny lot of
+fighting men, these poilous, with their red breeches, their long blue coat
+pinned back from the front, the little blue peaked cap, and their long
+black whiskers. I was horrified at the whole sight. For the first time I
+asked myself, "What in the world are _you_ out here for?"
+
+There must have been many of the boys who indulged in the same vein of
+thought, to judge by the seriousness of the faces as we proceeded and left
+the French hospital train behind.
+
+On the evening of the third day, as we pulled slowly into the station at
+Strazeele, we could hear in the distance the steady rumbling of the big
+guns at the front.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+ARE WE DOWNHEARTED? NO!
+
+
+"Hush, boys,... we're in enemy country!" our second in command whispered
+ominously. We shivered. The sound of the guns seemed to grow louder.
+Captain Johnson repeated his warning:
+
+"Not a word, men," he muttered, and we stumbled out of the station in
+silence that could be cut with a knife. Sure enough the enemy was near. He
+couldn't have been less than twenty-two miles away! We could hear him.
+There was no disposition on our part to talk aloud. Captain Johnson said:
+"Whisper," and whisper we did.
+
+We trekked over mud-holes and ditches, across fields and down through
+valleys. We had many impressions--and the main impression was mud. The main
+impression of all active service is--mud. It was silent mud, too, but we
+knew it was there. Once in a while during that dark treading through an
+unfamiliar country one of the boys would stumble and fall face down. Then
+the mud spoke ... and it did not whisper. There were grunts and murmurings,
+there were gurgling expletives and splutterings which sent the army, and
+all fools who joined it, to places of unmentionable climatic conditions. We
+were in it up to our necks, more or less literally.
+
+All the way along we could see the flashes of star shells. When one went up
+we could fancy the battalion making a "duck" in perfect unison. The star
+shells seemed very close. It was still for us to learn that they always
+seem close.
+
+After about seven miles of this trekking, we reached billets. This was our
+first experience of French billets. The rest-house was a barn and we were
+pretty lucky. We had straw to lie on.
+
+Notwithstanding our distance from the enemy, as Captain Johnson had said,
+we were in his country, and in consequence there had to be a guard. Four of
+the boys were picked for the job. There was no change in my luck. I was one
+of the chosen four.
+
+The guardroom, whether for good or ill, was set in a chicken house. And
+thereby hangs a tale--feather. Corporal of the guard was a sport. He was a
+young chap from Red Deer, Alberta. Now, figure the situation for yourself.
+For days past we had been feeding on bully beef--bully beef out of a tin.
+Four men on guard, a dozen chickens perched not a dozen feet away. Would
+abstemiousness be human? Ask yourselves, _mes amies_.
+
+We drew lots. My luck had turned. But I ate of it. It was tender; it was
+good; it was roasted to a turn.
+
+They say dead men tell no tales. Of dead chicken there is no such proverb.
+Wish there had been. We buried those feathers deep. Alas, that Monsieur, in
+common with all the folk in Northern France, was so thorough in his
+cataloguing of his properties. I don't blame him. He had dealt with Germans
+when they overran the territory. He had met with Belgians when they
+hastened forward. He had had experience of his own countrymen when they
+endeavored to drive back the enemy. He had billeted the Imperial British
+soldier. Now he was confronted with a soldier of whom he had no report,
+save only the name--Canadian. Monsieur had counted his chickens before they
+were perched.
+
+We had not yet had read or explained to us the laws and penalties attaching
+to such a crime while on active service. Of course, no one killed that
+chicken. No one ate it. No one knew anything about it. We were perfectly
+willing, if need be, to pay double price for the chicken rather than have
+such a term as "chicken thief" leveled at us. We of the guard, however,
+protested, but paid five francs each to smooth the matter over. This
+totaled about four dollars.
+
+The next morning the whole battalion was lined up before the colonel while
+the adjutant read aloud the law which we boys term the "riot act." This
+document informed us very clearly that if any soldier was found to have
+taken anything from the peasantry for his own use; if any man was found
+drunk on active service, or if he committed any other crime or offense
+which might be counted as minor to these two, the punishment for a first
+offense would be six months first field punishment. For any offense of a
+similar nature thereafter the man would be liable to court martial and
+death.
+
+While this paper was being read, I shook in my boots, to think that I had
+been--innocently or at least ignorantly--associated with what was probably
+the first crime of our battalion.
+
+[Illustration: On our way]
+
+We went back to billets a very subdued lot of soldiers.
+
+Later in the day I noticed a lot of boys talking to a young Belgian girl. I
+had no opportunity to speak to her then, but after a time I found her
+alone, and with the little English Mademoiselle Marie B---- had picked up
+from British soldiers lately billeted there, and with the small amount of
+French I had stored away, we held quite a long conversation.
+
+[Illustration: ©_Famous Players--Lasky Corporation. Scene from the
+Photo-Play_
+
+THE VOICE OF THE TEMPTER.]
+
+I should judge that she was about fifteen. She told me she was sixteen. She
+was piquant and pretty in appearance, but her features were drawn and her
+expression was sad. She had a questioning wistfulness in her eyes, but she
+showed no fear of the many British soldiers round.
+
+This young girl, little over a child, was all alone. She awaited in terror
+the coming of her baby, and the fiends who had outraged her had brutally
+cut off her right arm just a little above the elbow.
+
+"How did this happen to you, Mademoiselle?" I asked in French.
+
+"Ah, Monsieur," she replied, "_les Allemands_, they did--chop it off."
+
+"Why, Mademoiselle, surely no German would do such a hideous thing as that
+without some reason."
+
+At that time I believed, as apparently do the majority of people in this
+country to-day believe, that the Germans did not commit the atrocities that
+were attributed to them. But it is all true.
+
+"But, _oui_, Monsieur,... _les Allemands_, they have no reason. They kill
+my two brothers ... my father I have not seen, my mother I have not seen
+... no, not for five months. _Les Allemands_, they have taken them also ...
+they are dead also, _peutetre_."
+
+"And you?" I continued. "Where was your home?"
+
+"Ah, but it is the long story. We live close by Liége. It is a small
+village. The Uhlans come and we are sorely frightened. We hide in the
+cellar, and do not go out at all. While there _les Allemands_ post a notice
+in the village. It is that every person who has a gun, a pistol, a shell,
+an explosive, must hand such over to the burgomaster. We do not know of
+this, and do nothing. At last, Monsieur, the Uhlans come to our house to
+search, and there they see a shotgun and some shot. It is such a gun as you
+must know in the house of British, in the house of American. It is the
+common gun. We did not know. But there is no pardon for ignorance in war.
+My brothers were roughly pulled to the market place and shot dead." Little
+Marie choked down a sob. "My mother and my father," she continued, "were
+carried away. I refuse. I fight, I bite, I scratch, I scream with frenzy, I
+tear. One of _les Allemands_ ... perhaps he was mad, Monsieur, he slash ...
+so, and so ... he cut off my arm.
+
+"I remember no more, Monsieur. After a day ... two days, I find that I can
+walk. I walk and walk. It is now one hundred and fifty miles from my home
+... it is that I stay here until...."
+
+I grasped the girl's left hand and turned away. I was sick. What if she had
+been my sister?
+
+And then I thought of the laws read aloud to us that morning. We soldiers,
+fighting under the flag of the British Empire, were we to violate one
+little rule ... were we to take any property, no matter how small, without
+just payment to its owner; were we to drink one glass of beer too much ...
+were we to overstep by a hair's breadth the smallest rule of the code of a
+"soldier and a gentleman," we were liable to be shot.
+
+What of the German who had ruined this young girl and maimed her body?
+Believe me, I realized then, if never before, what we were fighting for. I
+was ready to give every drop of blood in my veins to avenge the great
+crimes that this little girl, in her frail person, typified.
+
+We passed another night in the same billets. Next morning at five-thirty we
+were roused to make a forced march, across country, of some twenty-two
+miles. This was the hardest march of the entire time I was at the front.
+Those ammunition boots! Those gol-darned, double distilled, dash, dash,
+dash, dashed boots!
+
+It was winter. There was heavy traffic over the roads. There were no road
+builders, and precious little organization for the traffic. Part of the way
+the surface had been cobblestones; now it was broken flints.
+
+We started out gallantly enough with full packs, very full packs. Then, a
+few miles out, one would see out of the corner of his eye, a shirt sail
+quietly across the hedge-row; an extra pair of boots in the other
+direction; another shirt, a bundle of writing paper; more shirts, more
+boots. Packs were lightening. Down to fifty pounds now; forty, thirty,
+twenty, ten ... the road was getting worse.
+
+No one would give up. Half a dozen men stooped and slashed at their boots
+to get room for a pet corn or a burning bunion. But every man pegged ahead.
+This was the first forced march. We were on our way to the trenches. No man
+dare run the risk of being dubbed a piker. We agonized, but persevered.
+
+Armentières was our objective. A fine city, this, and one which we might
+have enjoyed under happier circumstances. It was under fire, but not badly
+damaged, and consequently many thousands of the Imperial soldiers were
+"resting" there while back from the trenches.
+
+We were the First Canadians. We were expected, and the English Tommies
+determined to give us right royal welcome and a hearty handshake. We had a
+reputation to keep up, for in England the Cockney Tommy and his brother
+"civvies" had named us the "Singing Can-ydians."
+
+But on the road to Armentières ... oh, _ma foi_! There was no singing. Call
+us rather the "Swearing Can-ydians," as we stumbled, bent double, lifting
+swollen feet, like Agag, treading on eggs through the streets of the city.
+
+Tommy Atkins to right of us; Tommy Atkins to left of us, cobblestones
+beneath us, we staggered and swayed. The English boys cheered and yelled a
+greeting. It was rousing, it was thrilling, it was a welcome that did our
+hearts good; but we could not rise to the occasion.
+
+Suddenly from out of the crowd of khaki figures there came a voice--that of
+a true son of the East End--a suburb of Whitechapel was surely his cappy
+home.
+
+"S'y, 'ere comes the Singin' Can-ydians ... 'Ere they come ... 'Ear their
+singin'."
+
+Not a sound from our ranks. Silence. But it was too much. No one can offer
+a gibe to a man of the West without his getting it back. Far from down our
+column some one yelled:
+
+"Are we downhearted?" "No!" We peeled back the answer raucously enough, and
+then on with the song:
+
+  Are we downhearted? No, no, no.
+  Are we downhearted? No, no, no.
+  Troubles may come and troubles may go,
+  But we keep smiling where'er we go,
+  Are we downhearted? Are we downhearted?
+              No, no, _NO_!
+
+"No, Gor'blimey, y'er not down'earted, but yer look bally well
+broken-'earted," chanted our small Cockney comrade, with sarcasm ringing
+strong in every clipped tone of his voice.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+UNDER FIRE
+
+
+Broken-hearted! Gee! We sure were--nearly; but not quite. No. This was bad;
+there was worse to come, and still we kept our hearts whole.
+
+But there was another trial now, and we were directed to rest billets in
+what presumably had been a two-story schoolhouse or seminary. As soon as we
+reached this shelter we flopped down on the hard bare floor and lay just as
+we were, not even loosening our harness.
+
+We were less than three miles from the front lines. Even at this short
+distance Armentières, as a whole, had not suffered greatly from shell fire,
+though the upper floors of this old seminary had been shattered almost to
+ruins long before our arrival.
+
+The city itself was a good strategic point for the artillery. Behind
+houses, stores, churches, anywhere that offered concealment, our guns were
+hidden. Our artillery officers used every available inch of cover, for they
+had to screen our guns from the observation of enemy aircraft which flew
+with irritating irregularity over the town, and they had to avoid the none
+too praiseworthy attention of spies, in which Armentières was rich.
+
+Armentières in those days was practically a network of our gun
+emplacements. The majority were howitzers. These fire high; they have a
+possible angle of forty-five degrees. There was no danger of their damaging
+our own immediate positions.
+
+The ordinary infantry man knows less than nothing about artillery. If ever
+a bunch of greenhorns landed in France, frankly, we of the First Contingent
+were that same bunch.
+
+As we had marched through the city there had been no sound of gun-fire. All
+was quiet except for the welcoming cheers of our British brothers. Silence
+reigned for the two hours we had spent in resting on the floor of the
+schoolhouse, and consequently we thought we had a snap as far as position
+went.
+
+Our self-congratulations were somewhat rudely disturbed. Of a sudden, one
+of our young officers rushed through the door of our shelter. Poor laddie,
+he was very young and his anxiety exceeded even his nervousness.
+Nervousness is very natural, I can assure you. It is natural in a private;
+it is more so in the officer who feels responsibility for the lives of his
+men.
+
+"Lads," said he, with upraised hand, and obviously trying desperately to be
+calm, "lads, I've just been told that the enemy has the range of this
+building. 'Twas shelled yesterday, and we are likely to be blown up any
+minute ... any minute, men! I'd advise you to stay where you are. Don't any
+of you go outside, and if you don't want to lose your lives, don't go
+fooling around up-stairs." With that he pointed to the rickety steps that
+led to the second floor and disappeared through the door as fast as he had
+come.
+
+For a few moments there was dead silence. "Blow up any minute!" We looked
+at one another. We sat tense. Our very thoughts seemed petrified. From the
+far corner of the room there came a sound:
+
+"Gee whiz!... Gee whiz!" the voice gathered confidence. "Gee whiz,
+guys"--it was a boy from the Far West who spoke--"I've come six thousand
+miles, and to be blown up without even seeing a German is more than I can
+swallow."
+
+"Gosh!" said I, "I wouldn't mind being shot to-morrow morning at sunrise if
+I could have the satisfaction of seeing one of them first."
+
+Bob Marchington looked up. He was a droll youth, and curiosity was his
+besetting sin. "Say, fellows, I wonder why he told us not to go up-stairs.
+I bet you there's something to be seen from up there, or he would not have
+told us not to go. Any of you boys willing to come up with me?"
+
+No one took up the challenge. We lay around a little longer. Then the
+braver spirits commenced to deliberate on the suggestion. Why not go
+up-stairs? At last half a dozen of us decided to embark on the risky
+enterprise. We were three miles from the enemy, to be sure, but a German at
+three miles seemed to us then something formidable. Many a good laugh have
+we had since, in trench and out, at this expedition considered with so much
+careful thought!
+
+We crept up the shaky steps one by one. We crawled along the upper floor,
+skirting the gaping shell holes in the woodwork. We raised our hands and
+shaded our eyes from the glare of the light. We scanned the horizon. We had
+an idea, I think, that we'd see a German blocking the landscape somewhere.
+We were three miles away. What was three miles to us?
+
+We were deeply engrossed when there came a terrific crash. It seemed almost
+under our feet ... Rp-p-p-p-p-p bang, BANG! The next thing I remembered was
+landing at the foot of those narrow stairs, the other five boys on top of
+me. That is a feat impossible of repetition. When we disentangled
+ourselves, got to our feet and gathered our scattered wits, we found the
+men who had remained below tremendously excited. Their hair was on end;
+their eyes were like saucers. "Who's killed, fellows," they yelled, "who's
+killed?"
+
+Of course no one was hurt. Our own battery was just dropping a few over the
+Boches, but it was our first experience under fire. Behind the building a
+battery of our six-inch howitzers was concealed. When they "go off" they
+make a fearful racket; very likely any other bunch of fellows, not knowing
+the guns were there, would do as we did. I don't know. At all events, we
+stayed very quietly where we were thereafter.
+
+Later in the evening we found out the true and inner meaning of the excited
+order not to go outdoors or on the roof. It was a simple device to keep us
+from exploring the boulevards of the city. We might have been tempted to do
+that, for we had seen none of the charming French girls as yet, and they
+are--_tres charmante_.
+
+About six o'clock that evening we got the customary--the eternal--bully
+beef and biscuits. At seven we were ordered to advance to the front line
+trenches. Our captain gathered us around him. He wanted to talk to us
+before we went "in" for the first time. He was, possibly, a little
+uncertain of our attitude. He knew we were fighters all right, but our
+discipline was an unknown quantity. Captain Straight, I understand, was
+American-born, from Detroit, Michigan. We liked him. Later we almost
+worshiped him. We took all he said to heart. We listened intently; not a
+word did we miss. I can repeat from memory that pre-trench speech of his.
+
+"Boys," the captain's voice was solemnity itself. "Boys, to-night we are
+going into the front line trenches. We are going in with soldiers of the
+regular Imperial Army. We are going in with seasoned troops. We are going
+in alongside men who have fought out here for weeks. We've got to be very
+careful, boys."
+
+Our captain was obviously excited. We strained closer to him.
+
+"You don't know a darn thing about war, lads ... I know you don't."
+
+We fell back a pace somewhat abashed. We had been under fire that very
+afternoon; but the captain (fortunately) did not know it.
+
+"You don't know the first thing about this war. You've not had
+opportunities of asking about it from wounded men. Now, boys, I know
+exactly what you are going to do to-night when you get in those trenches.
+You're going to ask questions of those English chaps. YOU ARE NOT." He
+emphasized every one of those three words with a blow of one fist on the
+other.
+
+"You are not. Why, men, you know what the authorities think of our
+discipline. How are we to know that this is not a device to try our
+mettle. How are we to know that those boys already in are not there to
+watch us, to report our behavior ... and, by heaven, men, if we don't make
+a good showing perhaps they will report unfavorably on us; perhaps we will
+be shipped out of here, shipped back to Canada, and become the laughing
+stock of the world."
+
+Captain Straight strode up and down. "It won't do, my lads. You must not
+ask questions. Why, men, let those English fellows ask _you_ the questions.
+Don't you speak at all ... just you be brave. I know you _are_ brave ...
+stick out your chests." The captain gave us an illustration. We all drew
+ourselves up; we almost burst the buttons from our tunics in our endeavor
+to expand ... with bravery.
+
+"Keep your heads high," the captain went on, one word tripping the other in
+the eagerness of his speech. "March right in. Don't stop for anything. Get
+close to the parapet. Look at the British boys; throw them 'Hello, guys!'
+and begin to shoot right away."
+
+We were ready for anything. Were we not brave? Hadn't we shown our bravery
+by creeping up a ruined stairway only three miles from the enemy? We
+promised our captain, and then we commenced our march to the front.
+
+The green soldier is always put into the first line at the start. The
+general idea is that he should be put in reserves and worked up gradually,
+but, save under exceptional circumstances, he is put in the front line and
+worked back.
+
+It has been demonstrated that shell fire is much more severe on a man's
+nerves than rifle fire. Reserve trenches suffer more from shell fire than
+do the front line trenches. The reason is obvious. Sometimes the front line
+is but a stone's throw from the front line of the enemy. Sometimes we can
+converse with the enemy from one trench to the other. In such cases it is
+impossible for heavy artillery to be trained on the front. Rifles and bombs
+are the only explosives under these conditions.
+
+Again, the green soldier is never put into the trenches alone. A company of
+raw arrivals is sandwiched in with seasoned men. As we were the first
+Canadians to arrive, and there was none of our own men to help acclimatize
+us, we went in with an English regiment. There was one English, one
+Canadian and so on down the line. These boys belonged to the Notts and
+Derbys. Jolly fine boys, too. We became fast friends. They chummed to us as
+they would to their own. They showed us the ropes. They gave us tips on
+this thing and that. They told us the best way to cook, the various devices
+for snatching a few minutes' rest. They described the most effective
+"scratching" methods for the elimination of "gray-backs," "red-stripes,"
+"cooties," "crawlies"--any name you like to give those hosts of insect
+enemies that infest every trench.
+
+Now, "going in" isn't so easy as it sounds. We don't advance in companies
+four deep. We don't have bands. We don't have pipes to inspire our courage
+and rouse the fighting spirit inherited from long dead ancestors. It is a
+very--a vastly different matter. We go into the trenches in single file,
+each man about six paces from his nearest comrade. There is no question
+about keeping behind. Instinct takes care of that.
+
+A man may have a touch of lumbago; he may have a rheumatic pain. None of
+these things matters to him on the way "in." He can bend his back quickly
+enough as he passes along. There are always a few bullets dropping near by.
+One will hit the mud somewhere around his feet. The boy nearest springs as
+from a catapult until he is close to the comrade ahead of him. No; he never
+springs back. If he did ... he would be the man ahead. He would be in
+front. Nuffin' doin'--the whole idea is to keep behind; there is no doubt
+of that.
+
+But the guide is very vigilant. All troops are guided to their positions,
+and the man on this ticklish job is nearly always a sergeant. He has an
+eagle eye, and a feline sense of hearing. He will note your skip forward.
+
+"Keep your paces, lads ... keep your paces." His voice booms altogether too
+loud for us.
+
+"Hush! for the love o' Mike, Sergeant, not so loud." He chuckles. He knows
+that feeling so well, so awfully well now. He has been a guide these many
+times. But we skip back to our position, six paces behind. Then another
+bullet drops and the whole dance-step is repeated with little variation.
+The sergeant booms once more, and in desperation that the Boches will hear
+him, we obey.
+
+'Tis pretty how we step, too, on that first time "in." We lift each foot
+like a trotting thoroughbred. We step high, we step lightly. We tread as
+daintily as does a gray tomcat when he encounters a glass topped wall on a
+windy night.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE MAD MAJOR
+
+
+This first night in, had the commander-in-chief, had any one who questioned
+the discipline of the First Canadians, seen us, he would have been proud of
+our bearing, our behavior.
+
+The Tommy who has been there before, when on guard never shows above the
+parapet more than his head to the level of his eyes. When he has had his
+view on the ground ahead, he ducks. He looks and ducks frequently. But
+we--we were not real soldiers; we were super-soldiers. We were not brave;
+we were super-brave. We went into those trenches; we returned the greeting
+of the English boys; we lined up to the parapet; we stretched across it to
+the waistline, and then rose on tippy-toe. I do admit it was a very dark
+night; at least it appeared so to me. Oh, we were on the brave act, all
+right, all right.
+
+We stood there staring steadily into the blackness. Suddenly a bullet would
+come "Zing-g-g-g," hit a tin can behind us, and then we would duck,
+exclaim "Good lord! that was a close one," then resume the old position.
+But we soon learned not to have many inches of our bodies displayed,
+target-fashion, for the benefit of the Dutchies.
+
+The first night in we fired more bullets than on any other night we were at
+the front. We saw more Germans that night. They sprang up by dozens; they
+grew into hundreds as the minutes passed and the darkness deepened. We felt
+like the prophet Ezekiel as he viewed the valley of dry bones. There was
+the shaking, there was the noise, and my imagination, at least, supplied
+the miraculous warriors. It was an awful night, that first night in.
+
+Any one knows that if frightened in the dark (we were not frightened, of
+course; only a little nervous), the worst thing to do is to keep the eyes
+on one spot. Then one begins to see things. It is not necessary to be a
+soldier, and it is not necessary to go to the front line in France to make
+sure of that statement. Stare ahead into the dark anywhere and something
+will move.
+
+We had our eyes set, and we peppered away. An English officer strolled by,
+and addressed a fellow near me. "What the ... what the blinkety-blank are
+you shooting at?"
+
+"Me, sir ... m-me, sir? Germans, sir...." And he went on pumping bullets
+from his old Ross. The officer smiled.
+
+For myself, I was detailed for guard. I stood there on the firestep with my
+body half exposed. I did not feel very comfortable. I thought if I could
+get any other job to do, I would like it better. The longer I stayed, the
+more certain I became that I would be killed that night. I did not want to
+be killed. I thought it would be a dreadful thing to be killed the first
+night in. A few bullets had come fairly close--within a yard or two of my
+head. I determined there and then, should opportunity offer, I would not
+stay on guard a minute longer than I could help.
+
+My chance came sooner than I had hoped for. I hadn't realized, what I
+discovered after a few more turns in the trenches, that guard duty is the
+easiest job there is. I was eager for a change, and when I heard an English
+sergeant call out: "I want a Canadian to go on listening-post duty," I
+hopped down from my little perch and volunteered: "I'll go, Sergeant. Take
+me."
+
+I had my job transferred in a few minutes. I honestly did not know the duty
+for which I was wanted. I knew there was a ration back in the town. I had a
+vague idea that we would go back to the town for more bread or something of
+the kind.
+
+I had heard of an outpost, but a listening-post was a new one on me. These
+were very early days in the war. The Imperial soldiers had recently
+established this new system, and as yet it was not a matter of common
+knowledge.
+
+This war is either so old-fashioned in its methods or so new-fashioned--in
+my opinion it is both--that it is continuously changing. The soldier may be
+drilled well in his own land, if he comes from overseas; he may be
+additionally trained in England; he may have a couple of weeks at the base
+in France, but it is all the same--when he reaches the front line trenches
+there will have been a change, an improvement, in some thing or other. It
+may be but a detail, it may be but a new name for an old familiar job, but
+changed it is.
+
+The best soldier in the fighting to-day is the type of man who can adapt
+himself to anything. He must have initiative; he must have resource; he
+must have individuality; he must be a distinct and complete unit in
+himself, ready for any emergency and any new undertaking.
+
+I started promptly to hike down the communication trench, following back
+the way we had come. An English private soldier was detailed to go on
+listening-post with me. Again, the raw soldier is never left to his own
+devices on first coming in. He is given the support of a veteran on all
+occasions, unless under some very special condition.
+
+"Hie!" called the private to me, "where're yer goin' to?"
+
+"Back, ye bally ass!"
+
+He looked his contempt. "'Ave yer b'ynet fixed?" he asked, by way of
+answer.
+
+"Bayonet fixed?"
+
+"Yes," said he, "'urry up! We're late."
+
+"Late?" I repeated.
+
+"For Gawd's syke," he exclaimed, "don't yer know as 'ow we are goin' hout?
+Goin' over to the German trenches--goin' hout!"
+
+[Illustration: ©_Famous Players--Lasky Corporation. Scene from the
+Photo-Play_
+
+THE END OF A PERFECT DAY.]
+
+[Illustration: Cheerful beggars]
+
+I gulped. "Going to make a charge?"
+
+"No ... goin' HOUT ... listenin'-post." And that private started out across
+No Man's Land as nonchalantly as though he were strolling along his native
+strand. I followed. I followed cautiously. I don't know how I got out. I
+don't remember. I can't say that I was frightened ... no, I was just scared
+stiff. Five paces out I put my hand on the Englishman's shoulder ... I was
+quite close to him; don't doubt it. He stopped.
+
+"How far is it to the German trenches?" I whispered.
+
+"Eh?"
+
+I raised my voice just a trifle. I didn't know who might hear me: "How far
+is it to the German trenches?"
+
+"Five 'undred yards." My companion started off again. He stepped on a
+stick. I jumped. I jumped high. We continued, then I stopped him once more.
+
+"Are we alone out here? Are there any Germans likely to be out too?"
+
+"Why, yes ... plenty of 'em out here."
+
+"Do they go in pairs, like us; or have they squads of them...."
+
+"Pairs, my son, pairs, brace, couples...." The private strode on.
+
+"Do our boys ever meet any of the Boches?"
+
+"Sure! Many a time."
+
+"What do we do?"
+
+"Do? Stick 'em, matey, stick 'em! You've learnt to use yer b'ynet, 'aven't
+yer? Well, stick 'em ... kill 'em! Don't use yer rifle ... the flash would
+give you away, and then ye'd be a corpse."
+
+I felt I was a corpse already. I felt that if there was any killing to be
+done that night he would have to do it, not I.
+
+We crept more cautiously now. My comrade did not tread on sticks. I
+whispered to him for the last time: "What are we out here for, anyway?"
+
+Then he explained. He was a good-hearted chap. "Don't yer know w'ot
+listenin'-post is? W'y, there's a couple of us fellows hout at intervals
+all along the line. We get as close to the enemy parapet as is possible. We
+watch and listen, lyin' flat on the ousey ground hall the while. We are
+the heyes of the harmy. The Germans raid us on occasions. Were these posts
+not hout, the raids would be more frequent. They'd come hover and inflict
+severe casualties on hour men. They can't see the Boche. We can. Should one
+Boche, or five 'undred try to come hover that parapet, one of us must
+immediately set hout and run back to hour trenches and give the warnin' for
+hour boys to be ready. The other one of us stays back 'ere, and with cold
+steel keeps back the rush."
+
+I nodded. "What happens afterward to the man who stays back here?"
+
+"Mentioned in despatches ... sometimes," Tommy returned casually.
+
+I thought over the matter. Tommy whispered further.
+
+"Oh, yer needn't be a bit nervous. There's two of us lads about every forty
+or fifty yards. This is the w'y. 'Ere we are, 'ere the Boches are ... there
+the boys are"--he flicked an expressive thumb backward. "Those Boches
+thinks as 'ow they 'as to get to our trenches, but before they gets to our
+trenches, they 'as to pass us ... they 'as to pass US ... see?"
+
+I saw. "Say," I touched him gently, "a while before I joined up, I did the
+hundred yards in eleven seconds flat ... those Boches may pass you
+to-night, but never, on your life, will they pass me."
+
+Tommy chuckled. He had been through it all himself. Every man has it the
+first time that he goes on any of these dangerous duties. I can frankly say
+I disliked the listening-post duty that first time. Nothing happened of
+course. There was no killing, but it was nervy work. Later, in common with
+other fellows, I was able to go on listening-post with the same nonchalance
+as my first coster friend. It lies in whether one is used to the thing or
+not. Nothing comes easy at first, especially in the trenches. Later on, it
+is all in the day's work.
+
+When our relief came we crawled back to our trench and spent the night in
+our dugouts. Next day we got a change of rations. We had "Maconochie." "He"
+is by way of a stew. Stew with a tin jacket. It bears the nomenclature of
+its inventor and maker, although Maconochie's is a firm. This is an
+English ration and after bully beef for weeks, it is a pleasant enough
+change.
+
+The weather was fine: clear overhead, blue sky and just a hint of frost,
+though it was not very cold. After dinner the first day in the trenches, I
+suddenly noticed an excitement among the English soldiers. We became
+excited, too, and strained to see what was happening.
+
+There, sheer ahead of us, darting, twisting, turning, was a monoplane right
+over the German trench. It was a British plane, and taking inconceivably
+risky chances. We could see the airman on the steering seat wave to us. He
+seemed like a gigantic mosquito, bent on tormenting the Huns. Their bullets
+spurted round him. He spiraled and sank, sank and spiraled. Nothing ever
+hit him. The Boches got wildly hysterical in their shooting. Every rifle
+pointed upward. They forgot where they were; they forgot us; they fired
+rapidly, round after round. And still the plane rose and fell, flitted
+higher and looped lower. It was a magnificent display. We could see the
+aviator wave more clearly now; his broad smile almost made us imagine we
+heard his exultant laugh.
+
+"Who is it? What is it?" We boys gasped out the questions breathlessly.
+
+"'Ere he comes; watch 'im, mate; watch 'im. 'E's the Mad Major. Look,
+look--he's looping! Gawd in 'eaven, they've got 'im. No, blimey, 'e's
+blinkin' luck itself. 'E's up again."
+
+"Who is the Mad Major?" I asked, but got no answer. Every eye was on the
+wild career of the plane.
+
+The Germans got more reckless. They stood in their trenches. We fired. We
+got them by the ones and twos. They ducked, then--swoop--again the major
+was over them, and again they forgot. Up went their rifles, and spatter,
+spatter, the bullets went singing upward.
+
+It was about an hour after that we heard a voice cry down to us: "Cheer up,
+boys, all's well." There, overhead, was the Mad Major in his plane. Elusive
+as was the elusive Pimpernel, he flitted back of the lines to the
+plane-base.
+
+"Who is he?" We crowded round the English Tommies when all was quiet.
+
+"The Mad Major, Canuck," they answered. "The Mad Major."
+
+"Yes, but--"
+
+"Never 'eard of 'im, 'ave yer?" It was a sergeant who spoke, and we closed
+round, thinking to hear a tale.
+
+"'E comes round 'ere every evenin', 'e does. 'E 'as no fear, that chap, 'e
+'asn't. Does it to cheer us up. Didn't yer 'ear 'im as 'e went? 'E 'arries
+them, 'e does, 'arries them proper. Down 'e'll go, up 'e'll go, and ne'er a
+bullet within singing distance of 'im. 'E's steeped in elusion!" The
+sergeant finished, proud of having found a phrase, no matter what might be
+its true meaning, that illustrated what he wished to convey.
+
+The Mad Major certainly appeared immune from all of the enemy's fire.
+
+The sergeant went on. He, himself, had been with the Imperial forces since
+August, 1914. He had fought through the Aisne, the Marne, and the awful
+retreat from Mons.
+
+'Twas at Mons, he told us, that the Mad Major earned his sobriquet, and
+first showed his daring. During those awful black days when slowly, slowly
+and horribly, French and British and Belgians fought a backward fight, day
+after day and hour after hour, losing now a yard, now a mile, but always
+going back--then it was that with the dreadful weight of superior
+numbers--maybe twenty to one--the Germans had a chance to win. Then it was
+they lost, and lost for all time.
+
+All through this rearguard action there was the Mad Major. Mounted on his
+airy steed, he flitted above the clouds, below the clouds. Sometimes
+swallowed in the smoke of the enemy's big guns; sometimes diving to avoid a
+shell; sometimes staggering as though wounded, but always righting himself.
+There would be the Mad Major each day, over the rearguard troops, seeming
+to shelter them. He would harry the German line; he would drop a bomb, flit
+back, and with a brave "We've got them, boys," cheer the sinking spirits of
+the wearied foot soldiers.
+
+The Mad Major was a wonder. Every part of the line he visited, and was
+known the length and breadth of the Allied armies.
+
+Though for the moment the Mad Major had disappeared from our view, we were
+to hear more of him later on.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+WHO STARTED THE WAR?
+
+
+The wisest thing that our commanders did was to sandwich the Canadian boys
+in with the British regulars. Without a doubt we of the First Division were
+the greenest troops that ever landed in France.
+
+In two short turns that we spent with the British, we learned more than we
+could have otherwise in a month's training. We also became inspired with
+that "Keep cool and crack a joke" spirit that is so splendidly Anglo-Saxon.
+
+I am not an Englishman, and I did not think very much of an Englishman
+before going overseas. I regarded him more or less as not "worth while." It
+did not take a year to convince me that the Englishman is very much "worth
+while."
+
+The English soldier chums up quickly. The traditional formality and
+conventionality of the English are traditions only. There is none of it in
+the trenches.
+
+Discipline there is, strict discipline, among men and officers. Between
+officer and man there is a marked respect, and a marked good fellowship
+which never degenerates into familiarity.
+
+There is love between the English officer and the English soldier. A love
+that has been proved many times, when the commissioned man has sacrificed
+his life to save the man of lower rank; when the private has crossed the
+pathway of hell itself to save a fallen leader.
+
+The English soldier, and when I say English I mean to include Welsh, Scotch
+and Irish, reserves to himself the right to "grouse." He grouses at
+everything great or small which has no immediate or vital bearing on the
+situation. As soon as anything arises that would really warrant a
+grouse--napoo! Tommy Atkins then begins to smile. He grouses when he has to
+clean his buttons; he grouses loudly and fiercely when a puttee frays to
+rags, and he grouses when his tea is too hot.
+
+But when Tommy runs out of ammunition, is partly surrounded by the enemy,
+is almost paralyzed by bombardment; when he is literally in the last ditch,
+with a strip of cold steel the only thing between him and death--then
+Tommy smiles, then he cracks a joke. Without a thought of himself, without
+a murmur, he faces any desperate plight.
+
+He smiles as he rattles his last bullet into place; he grins as his bayonet
+snaps from the hilt, and he goes to it hand-to-hand with doubled fists, a
+tag of a song on his lips, for "Death or Glory."
+
+That is Tommy Atkins as I saw him. That is the real Britisher of the Old
+Country. We shall know him from now on in his true light, and the knowledge
+will make for a better understanding among the peoples of the
+English-speaking world.
+
+It was Sandy Clark who, eating a hunch of bread and bully beef in a dugout,
+got partly buried when an H.E. (high explosive) came over. Sandy crawled
+out unhurt, his sandwich somewhat muddy but intact, and made his way down
+the trench to a clear space. Here he sat down beside a sentry, finished his
+bully beef and muddy bread, wiped his mouth, and remarked some ten minutes
+after the explosion: "That was a close one."
+
+Imperturbable under danger; certain of his own immediate immunity from
+death; confident of his regiment's invincibility; with a deep-rooted love
+of home and an unalterable belief in the might and right of Britain--there
+is Tommy Atkins.
+
+Looking back from the vantage point of nearly two years, it seems to me
+that we were somewhat like young unbroken colts. We were restless and
+untrained, with an overplus of spirits difficult to control. Gradually the
+English Tommy influenced us until we gained much of his steadiness of
+purpose, his bulldog tenacity and his insouciance.
+
+Tommy never instructed us by word of mouth. He lived his creed in his daily
+rounds. He never knows that he is beaten, therefore a beating is never his.
+We have gained the same outlook, simply by association with him.
+
+Were I a general and had I a position to _take_, I would choose soldiers of
+one nation as quickly as another--French, Australians, Africans, Indians,
+Americans or Canadians. Were I a general and had I a position to _retain_,
+to hold against all odds, then, without a moment's hesitation, I would send
+English troops and English troops only.
+
+Now and again an American or a Canadian newspaper would come our way.
+"Anything to read" is a never-ending cry at the front, and every scrap of
+newspaper is read, discussed and read again. In the early days of 1914-15,
+these newspapers would have long and weighty editorials which called forth
+longer and weightier letters from "veritas" and "old subscriber." We boys
+read those editorials and letters, and wondered; wondered how sane men
+could waste time in writing such stuff, how sane men could set it in type
+and print it, and more than all we wondered how sane men could read it.
+"Who started the war?" they asked.
+
+"Bah!" we would say to one another, "who started the war? If only those
+folks who write and print and read such piffle, no matter what their
+nationality, could have had five minutes' look at the German trenches and
+another five minutes' look at the French and British trenches--never again
+would they query, 'Who started the war?'"
+
+We of the Allied army knew nothing of trench warfare. After the fierce
+onslaught on Paris, which failed, the Germans entrenched. Thank God, they
+did. They entrenched, and by entrenching they have won the war for us. They
+made a mistake then that they can never now retrieve.
+
+They were in a position to choose, and they chose to entrench in the high
+dry sections, leaving the low-lying swamps, the damp marshy lands, for us.
+We had no alternative. It was either to take a stand there on what footing
+was left or be wiped off the map. We stood.
+
+On that sector between La Bassee and Armentières it was practically an
+impossibility to dig in. The muddy water was of inconceivable thickness
+along the greater length of the whole front. It oused and eddied, it seemed
+to swirl and draw as though there were a tide. We did not attempt to dig.
+We raised sandbag breastworks some five or six feet high and lay behind
+them day in and day out for an eternity, as it seemed.
+
+Our shift in the trenches was supposed to be four days and four nights in.
+It never was shorter, sometimes much longer. Once we spent eleven days and
+nights in the trenches without a shift, because our reinforcing battalion
+was called away to another sector of the front. I know of a Highland
+Battalion that was in twenty-eight days and nights without a change.
+
+We were unequipped as to uniform. We were in the regulation khaki of other
+days. We had no waterproof overcoats. We had puttees, but the greater
+number of us had no rubber boots. A very few of the men had boots of rubber
+that reached to the knees. At first we envied the possessors of these, but
+not for long. The water and mud, and shortly the blood, rose above the top
+and ran down inside the leg of the boot. The wearers could not remove the
+mud, and trench feet, frost bite, gangrene, was their immediate portion. We
+lost as many men, that first winter of the war, by these terrible
+afflictions as we did by actual bullets and shell fire.
+
+To us who had come from the Far Northwest the weather was a terrible trial.
+Our winters were possibly more severe, but we could stand them so much
+better, with their sharp dry cold in contrast to the damp, misty, soaking
+chill of this non-zero country. Possibly, at night, the thermometer would
+register some two or three degrees below freezing. A thin shell of ice
+would form on the ditch which we called a trench. This would crackle round
+our legs and the cold would eat into the very bone. At dawn the ice would
+begin to break up and a steady sleet begin to fall. Later the sleet would
+turn to rain, and so the day would pass till we were soaked through to the
+skin. At night the frost would come again and stiffen our clothes to our
+tortured bodies, next day another thaw and rain, and so to the end of our
+turn, or to the time when an enemy bullet would finish our physical
+suffering.
+
+We could have borne all this without a murmur, and did bear it in a silence
+that was grim, but we had a greater strain, a mental one, with which to
+contend. We knew--we knew without a doubt that we were out there alone. We
+had not a reserve behind us. We had not a tithe of the gun power which we
+should have had. Our artillery was not appreciable in quantity. What there
+was of it was effective, but as compared to the enemy gun power we were
+nowhere. They had possibly ten to our one. They were very considerably
+stronger than they are to-day. We, to-day, can say with truth that we are
+where they were in 1914-15. We, with our two years of hurried and almost
+frenzied work, and they, with their forty years of crafty preparation!
+
+And they knew how to use those guns, too. Our engineering and pioneer
+corps at that time were non-existent. We had practically none. The Germans
+would put over a few shells during the day. They would level our sandbag
+breastworks and blow our frail shelters to smithereens. We had no dugouts
+and no communication trenches. With a shell of tremendous power they would
+rip up yards of our makeshift defenses and kill half a dozen of our boys.
+Sometimes we would groan aloud and pray to see a few German legs and arms
+fly to the four winds as compensation. But no. We would wire back to
+artillery headquarters: "For God's sake, send over a few shells, even one
+shell, to silence this hell!" And day after day the same answer would come
+back: "Heaven knows we are sorry, but you've had your allotment of shells
+for to-day."
+
+Perhaps one shell, or it may have been three, would have been the
+ammunition ration of our particular front for the day.
+
+It was nobody's fault at the moment of fighting. It lay perhaps between
+those who had anticipated and prepared for war for forty years and those
+who had neglected to foresee the possibility of such an enterprise. The
+fact remained, we had no shells.
+
+Every day our defenses were leveled. Every night we would crawl out, after
+long hours spent flat on our stomachs, covered to the neck in mud and
+blood, and endeavor to repair the damage. Every night we lost a few men;
+every day we lost a few men, and still we held our ground.
+
+The day casualties were the worst. The wounded men had to lie in the damp
+and dirt until night came to shelter them; then some one would help, or if
+that were not possible, the wounded would have to make his own pain-strewn
+way back to a dressing station. During the day some one might discover that
+he had developed a frozen toe. He could get no relief; he dare not attempt
+to leave his partial shelter. The slightest movement, and the enemy would
+have closed his career. By night his foot would be a fiery torture, and by
+the time a doctor was near enough to help it would be a rotting mass of
+gangrene, and one man more would be added to the list of permanent
+cripples.
+
+I am asked, "How did you live? How did you 'carry on'?"
+
+Many a time I have said to myself in thinking of the enemy: "Why don't they
+come on--why don't the fools strike now? There's no earthly reason why they
+should not defeat us, and roll on triumphantly to Paris, to Calais, to
+London, to New York, and so realize their original intention." There was no
+_earthly_ reason. No.
+
+The Kaiser had talked in lordly voice of "ME and God." The Kaiser has
+manufactured a God of his own fancy, a God of blood and iron. There is no
+such God for us. For us, there was always that Unseen Hand which held back
+the enemy in his might. The All Highest who is not on the side of blood and
+murder and pillage and outrage and violation; the Almighty, who, crudely
+though I may express it, is with those who fight for the Right and on the
+square.
+
+And that is why we were not driven back to the sea. That is why we stood
+the test. That is why we, the Allied Nations, shall win.
+
+Again, if the German hordes, with their iron power behind them, had had
+five per cent. of the Anglo-Saxon sporting blood in their veins, they could
+have licked us long ago. They did not. They have not. They are poor
+sports. They have eliminated the individuality of "sport" for the
+efficiency of machinery, and they can not lick us.
+
+Who started the war? The War Machine that had the preparation of half a
+century, or the peace-loving peoples who, at a day's notice, took their
+stand for humanity?
+
+Who started the war? There is no room for argument. The Germans started the
+war.
+
+Who will finish the war? There is no room or argument. We will finish the
+war.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+"AND OUT OF EVIL THERE SHALL COME THAT WHICH IS GOOD"
+
+
+The worst days of this war are over. The worst days were those through
+which we came in the winter of 1914-15. The war may last ten years; the war
+may be over inside of a few months. Neither contingency would surprise me.
+We might lose twice as many in killed and wounded as we did through that
+winter; every white man, British, French, American, of military age, might
+pay the supreme price, and yet the worst days are gone by.
+
+The worst days of the war passed when the chance of the Hun defeating us
+was lost. Though all the flower of our manhood were crippled or dead,
+though our old men and our boys were called to the field, though women had
+to gird on sword and buckler, none of these things could be worse than to
+be licked--licked is the word--by a dastardly and cowardly foe.
+
+And if the German Army at the zenith of its strength could not lick one
+thin line of English, of French and Canadians, how can they lick us when we
+have Uncle Sam in the balance?
+
+A question to daunt even the scientific brain of a Kaiser, of a Hindenburg,
+of a Von Bernstorff.
+
+The folks back home are always wondering and inquiring how it is possible
+to feed the troops under such terrible and awful conditions. The folks back
+home are the only ones who worry. We do not. Tommy Atkins is much more sure
+of getting his rations to-morrow than he is of living until to-morrow to
+eat them.
+
+Right here I would pay a sincere tribute to two departments of our British
+Army. The Commissary Department which supplies every want of the soldier,
+from a high explosive shell to a button. It is as near to the one hundred
+per cent. mark of efficiency as it is possible for a human organization to
+become. It is not too much to say that it is perfect.
+
+The other department is that of the Medical Corps, the R.A.M.C., or the Red
+Cross. It is all the same. It is all run with the precision of clockwork.
+Its whole aim for the comfort and succor of Tommy. Of this department I
+speak in a later chapter.
+
+The food for the millions of men in France is concentrated at what we may
+call the Great Base, and from there it is distributed to the different army
+corps. In each army corps there are two or more divisions. In a division
+there are three infantry and three artillery brigades, three field
+companies of engineers, three field ambulances and details. In each
+infantry brigade are four battalions and in each artillery four batteries.
+To one company are four platoons, and about seventy men to a platoon.
+
+Each body of men as I have named them is really a separate and distinct
+unit in itself, but cooperating with all others. The food from the base is
+brought to the army corps by rail, and is distributed to the divisional
+headquarters by divisional transports which are operated by the Army
+Service Corps or the Mechanical Transport. From the divisional headquarters
+the next step is to the brigades, and brigade transports collect the food
+and take it another few miles nearer to the boys.
+
+Battalion transport wagons then bring the food and other supplies down to
+battalion headquarters. At these headquarters are the quartermaster
+sergeants of each company, and they, with their staff, during the daytime
+pack up and get ready for distribution supplies for each separate platoon.
+At night the company wagons, already packed, are drawn up as close to the
+trenches as conditions will permit. If the country is too torn with shells
+to permit the use of horses, men will drag them.
+
+I have seen these wagons sometimes within five hundred yards of the front
+line trenches, and again ration parties may have to crawl back a mile
+before meeting them. It all depends on a number of circumstances. On a
+moonlight night it is not possible to come so close as on a dark night. In
+rain the wagons may sink into mud-holes, or in badly shelled areas there is
+danger of their turning over into a hole. Everything depends on conditions
+and the good judgment of the man in charge.
+
+[Illustration: ©_Famous Players--Lasky Corporation. Scene from the
+Photo-Play_
+
+THE HUN COMES TO TOWN.]
+
+Each evening from each section, and there are four sections to a platoon,
+the corporal or sergeant in command will detail a couple of men for ration
+party. Ration party is no pleasant job; as Tommy terms it, it is "one of
+the rottenest ever."
+
+[Illustration: ©_Famous Players--Lasky Corporation. Scene from the
+Photo-Play_
+
+"WHO'S THE GIRL, PEAT?"]
+
+The two unhappy boys will crawl out as soon as it is dark. They reach the
+supply wagon, or it may be only a dump of goods. There they will find the
+quartermaster in charge, in all likelihood. To him they tell their platoon
+number--Number Sixteen Platoon, Section Four, perhaps--and the
+quartermaster will hand them the rations. One man will get half a dozen
+parcels, maybe more. His comrade never offers to relieve him of any--to the
+comrade there is designated a higher duty. The quartermaster takes up with
+care and hands with tenderness to the second man a jar, or possibly a jug.
+
+On going back to the trenches a thoughtless sentry may halt the ration
+party. I have seen it done. I have heard the conversation. I dare not write
+it. There goes one of the boys, both arms hugging a miscellaneous
+assortment of packages. He slips and struggles and swears and falls, then
+picks himself up and gathers together the scattered bundles. But what of
+the other? A jug held tightly in both hands, he chooses his steps as would
+a dainty Coryphee. He dare not trip. He dare not fall. He MUST not spill
+one drop. Jugs are hard to replace in France; in fact, it is much easier to
+get a jug in Nebraska than in France.
+
+The boys finally reach the trench in safety, and next morning the rations
+are issued at "stand-to." "Stand-to" is the name given to the sunrise hour,
+and again that hour at night when every man stands to the parapet in full
+equipment and with fixed bayonet. After morning stand-to bayonets are
+unfixed, for if the sunlight should glint upon the polished steel our
+position might be disclosed to some sniper.
+
+To my mind stand-to is more or less a relic of the early days of the war,
+when these two hours were those most favored by the Germans for attack, and
+so it has become a custom to be in readiness.
+
+A day's rations in the trenches consists of quite a variety of commodities.
+First thing in the winter morning we have that controversial blind, rum. We
+get a "tot" which is about equal to a tablespoonful. It is not compulsory,
+and no man need take it unless he wishes. This is not the time or place to
+discuss the temperance question, but our commanders and the army surgeons
+believe that rum as a medicine, as a stimulant, is necessary to the health
+of the soldier, therefore the rum is issued.
+
+We take this ration as a prescription. We gulp it down when half frozen,
+and nearly paralyzed after standing a night in mud and blood and ice, often
+to the waistline, rarely below the ankle, and it revives us as tea, cocoa
+or coffee could never do. We are not made drunkards by our rum ration. The
+great majority of us have never tasted medicinal rum before reaching the
+trenches; there is a rare chance that any of us will ever taste it, or want
+to taste it, again after leaving the trenches.
+
+The arguments against rum make Mr. Tommy Atkins tired, and I may say in
+passing that I have never yet seen a chaplain refuse his ration. And of the
+salt of the good God's earth are the chaplains. There was Major the
+Reverend John Pringle, of Yukon fame, whose only son Jack was killed in
+action after he had walked two hundred miles to enlist. No cant, no smug
+psalm-singing, mourners'-bench stuff for him. He believed in his
+Christianity like a man; he was ready to fight for his belief like a man;
+he cared for us like a father, and stood beside us in the mornings as we
+drank our stimulant. Again, I repeat if a man is found drunk while on
+active service, he is liable to court martial and death. A few years'
+training of this kind will make the biggest pre-war drunkard come back home
+a sober man.
+
+Each soldier carries into the trenches with him sufficient coke and wood to
+last for his four days in. Upon the brazier he cooks his own meals. For the
+first few months we were unable to place our braziers on the ground; they
+would have sunk into the mud. If we attempted to cook anything we would
+stick a bayonet into a sandbag and hang the brazier on it, then cook in our
+mess tins over that.
+
+To-day there are dugouts, trench platforms and other conveniences which
+simplify the domestic arrangements of the trenches to a marvelous degree.
+
+A soldier is at liberty to cook his own rations by himself, but as a rule
+we all chum in together. We may all take a hand in the cooking, or we may
+appoint a section cook for a day or for a week, according to his especial
+facility.
+
+After the rum ration we receive some tea and sugar, lots of bully beef and
+biscuits. The bully beef is corned beef and has its origin, mysterious to
+us, in Chicago, Illinois, or so we believe. It is quite good. But you can
+get too much of a good thing once too often. So sometimes we eat it, and
+sometimes we use the unopened tins as bricks and line the trenches with
+them. Good solid bricks, too! We get soup powders and yet more soup
+powders. We get cheese that is not cream cheese, and we get a slice of raw
+bacon. Often we eat the bacon at once, sometimes we save it up to have a
+"good feed" at one time. One can plan one's own menu just as fancy
+dictates.
+
+Then we get jam. The inevitable, haunting, horrific "plum and apple." This
+is made by Ticklers', Limited, of London, England, and after the tins are
+empty we use them to manufacture hand grenades. In those days our supply of
+hand bombs was like our supply of shells, problematic to say the least.
+After a time, back of the line, instruction schools were opened in bomb
+making and bomb throwing. One or two out of a platoon would go back and
+learn "how," and then instruct the rest of us to fill the tins with spent
+pieces of shrapnel, old scraps of iron, anything which came handy, insert
+the fuse, cotton and so forth, and thus form an effective weapon for close
+fighting.
+
+We called those bombers "Ticklers' Artillery Brigade," and they tickled
+many a German with Ticklers' empty jam tins.
+
+A stock of weak tea, some sugar, salt, some bully beef, biscuits crumbled
+down, the whole well stirred and brought to a boil, then thickened by
+several soup powders, is a recipe for a stew which, as the Irishman said,
+is "filling and feeding." Of its appearance I say nothing.
+
+Regardless of any, we are the best fed troops in the field. While in the
+trenches the food may be rough and monotonous, but there is plenty of it,
+and it is of the best quality of its kind. No man need ever be hungry in
+the trenches. It is his own fault if he is.
+
+We grouse at our rations, of course, and make jokes and laugh, but we never
+run short of supplies.
+
+Behind the lines, when we go back for a rest and are in billets, we are
+supplied with well-cooked and comfortable meals. Three good squares a day.
+We have here our field kitchens and our regular cooks, and Mulligan (stew)
+is not the daily portion, but variations of roast beef, mutton and so
+forth.
+
+It is good food, and I have heard men exclaim that it was better than
+anything they had had at home. After investigation I usually found that the
+men who dilated thus on the gastronomic delights of billets were married
+men!
+
+The authorities are just as careful about sending up a soldier's letters,
+his parcels and small gifts from home, as they are about the food and
+clothing supplies. They recognize that Tommy Atkins naturally and rightly
+wants to keep in touch with the home folks, and every effort is made to get
+communications up on time. But war is war, and there are days and even
+weeks when no letters reach the front line. Those are the days that try the
+mettle of the men. We do not tell our thoughts to one another. The soldier
+of to-day is rough of exterior, rough of speech and rough of bearing, but
+underneath he has a heart of gold and a spirit of untold gentleness.
+
+We play poker, and we play with the sky the limit. Why not? Active service
+allowance is thirty francs a month--five dollars. Why put on any limit? You
+may owe a man a hundred, or even two hundred dollars, but what's the
+difference?--a shell may put an end to you, him and the poker board any old
+minute. There is no knowing.
+
+Weeks pass and no letters. We play more wildly, squatting down in the mud
+with the board before us. I have sometimes seen a full house, a straight,
+three of a kind, or probably four big ones. "I raise you five," says Bill.
+Bang!--a whiz bang explodes twenty yards away. "I raise you ten." Bang!--a
+wee willie takes the top off the parapet. "There's your ten, and ten
+better." Crash!--and several bits of shrapnel probably go through the
+board. "You're called. Gee, but that was a close one! Deal 'em out, Peat."
+
+Suddenly down the trench will pass the word that the officer and sergeant
+are coming with letters and parcels. We kick the poker board high above the
+trench, cards and chips flying in all directions. No one cares, even though
+he's had a hand full of aces. The letters are in, and every man is dead
+sure there will be one for him.
+
+We crowd around the officer with shining eyes like so many schoolboys.
+Parcels are handed out first, but we throw these aside to be opened later,
+and snatch for the letters. But luck is not always good to all of us, and
+possibly it will be old Bill who has to turn away empty-handed and alone.
+No letter. Are they all well, or--no letter.
+
+But Bill is not left alone very long. A pal will notice him, notice him
+before he himself has had more than a glimpse of the heading of his own
+precious letter, and going over to Bill, will slap him a hearty blow on the
+shoulder and say: "Say, Bill, old boy, I've got a letter. Listen to this--"
+And then, no matter how sacred the letter may be, he will read it aloud
+before he has a chance to glance at it himself. If it is from the girl, old
+Bill will be laughing before it is finished--girls write such amusing
+stuff; but, no matter whom it is from, it is all the same. It is a pleasure
+shared, and Bill forgets his trouble in the happiness of another.
+
+Kindness, unselfishness and sympathy are all engendered by trench life.
+There is no school on earth to equal the school of generous thoughtfulness
+which is found on the battle-fields of Europe to-day. There we men are
+finding ourselves in that we are finding true sympathy with our brother
+man. We have everything in common. We have the hardship of the trench, and
+the nearness of death. The man of title, the Bachelor of Arts, the
+bootblack, the lumberjack and the millionaire's son meet on common ground.
+We wear the same uniform, we think the same thoughts, we do not remember
+what we were, we only know what we are--soldiers fighting in the same great
+cause.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+ALL FUSSED UP AND NO PLACE TO GO
+
+
+Some days in the trenches are dreariness itself. Sometimes we get
+discouraged to the point of exhaustion, but these days are rare and when
+they do occur there is always an alleviation. In every trench, in every
+section, there is some one who is a joker; who is a true humorist, and who
+can carry the spirits of the troops with him to the place where grim
+reality vanishes and troubles are forgotten.
+
+The nights pass quickly enough because at night we have plenty to do. But
+even while carrying out duties at night many humorous things happen. Take,
+for instance, the passing of messages up and down the line.
+
+To the civilian message-sending might appear much the same day or night,
+but not so. In the day we can speak without fear of being overheard, but at
+night no one knows but that Hans or Fritz may be a few feet on the other
+side of the parapet with ears cocked for all sounds. So communications
+have to be made with care. Sometimes the change of a syllable might alter
+the meaning of a sentence and cause disaster.
+
+A message at night is whispered in lowest tones from man to man. This is a
+branch of the service for the young recruit to practise. It means much, and
+a thoughtless error is unpardonable. The first man receives the
+communication from the officer. Through the silence will come a soft
+"Hs-s-s." The next in line will creep up and get the words. He in turn
+calls to the next man and whispers on the order.
+
+It was one night early in the fighting that Major Kirkpatrick sent the
+message down the line four hundred yards along: "Major Kirkpatrick says to
+tell Captain Parkes to send up reinforcements to the right in a hurry."
+That was the message as I got it. That was the message as I transmitted it
+to the next man. To Captain Parkes the message ran in a hurried whisper:
+"Major Kirkpatrick says to tell Captain Parkes to send up 'three and
+fourpence' to the right in a hurry."
+
+When Major Kirkpatrick received three shillings and fourpence he was
+almost in a state of collapse. Luckily, the situation was not serious, or
+possibly we might have lost heavily. This shows how imperative it is to
+have absolute accuracy.
+
+Again, at nights there are different kinds of raids to be carried out.
+Probably a raid by wire cutters, or possibly an actual trench raid. Nights
+in France are not meant for sleep. There is usually one hour on duty and
+two hours off, and something doing all the while.
+
+But the days frequently grow long and tiresome. We sleep, we tell stories,
+we read when there is anything to read, and we write letters if we have the
+materials. Or, above all, we work out some new device to spring upon the
+Boche.
+
+In the early days of the war we knew nothing about hand grenades. The
+Germans started to use them on us, but it was not a great while before we
+fell into line and produced bombs to match theirs. At first we had the
+Tickler variety as previously described; since then we have used the
+"hair-brush" and others, but to-day we are using the standardized Mill hand
+grenade.
+
+I can never forget the first bomb that was thrown from our trench.
+Volunteers were asked for this new and risky job. I will not mention the
+name of the boy who volunteered in our section, but he was a big, hefty,
+red-haired chap. He has since been killed. It is noticeable that red-haired
+fellows are impetuous and frequently ahead of others in bravery, for a
+moment or two, anyway.
+
+That day there was an additional supply of mud and water in our trench. We
+were dragging around in it until the bombing commenced, then we crowded
+like boys round the big fellow, who was close to the parapet, his chest
+stuck out, his voice vibrant with pride as he said, "Just you wait and see
+me blow those fellows to smithereens--just you wait and see!"
+
+In those days of makeshift bombs there was a nine-second fuse in each. We
+were about thirty yards from the Germans' trench. Of course it would not
+take nine seconds for the bomb to travel thirty yards; rather would it
+arrive in three seconds, and give Hans and Fritz opportunity to pick it up
+comfortably and return it in time for its explosion to kill us and not
+them. Thus the order was to count at least five--one, two, three, four,
+five--slowly and carefully, after the fuse was lighted and before the bomb
+left the hand.
+
+Every one had his eyes glued to the periscope, except myself. I watched the
+fuse in the hand of that red-haired guy. He started to count--one, two, and
+his hand began to shake; at three his hand was moving about violently; at
+four the bomb fell. I wonder if there is any one in the world who thinks
+that we stopped there to see that bomb explode. No, we didn't.
+
+There was a chance right there for the quick thinker, for the man of
+extraordinary initiative, to win the V.C. Somehow our initiative took us in
+the other direction. It is really wonderful how fast the average man can
+beat it when he knows there is certain death should he linger in one spot
+very long. The way we traveled round the traverse and up the trenches was
+not slow.
+
+Usually there is something going on, but there are days when a man would
+not think there was a war at all. It is not every day at the front that
+both sides are shelling and strafing. We once faced a certain Saxon
+regiment and for nearly two weeks neither side fired a bullet. This
+particular Saxon regiment said to us: "We are Saxons, you are
+Anglo-Saxons, we are not a bit fussy about shooting as long as you won't."
+So, as our turns came periodically, we faced them and did not shoot.
+
+Actually we sent out working parties in the daytime, both Saxon and
+British, but such things do not happen any more. And such a situation never
+yet happened with a Prussian or Bavarian regiment. Those devils like to
+shoot for the sake of hearing their rifles go off.
+
+There are days, when fighting at close quarters, that both sides feel
+pretty good. The morning will be bright, and we may open the proceedings by
+trying to sing German songs, and they will join in by singing British airs,
+but always in a sarcastic manner, after putting words to them that I dare
+not write.
+
+On the first day of July, which is Dominion or Confederation Day, the
+Germans began by singing to a certain Eastern Canadian regiment the first
+verse of our national anthem, _O! Canada_. When they got through, they
+politely asked the young braves of this regiment to sing the second verse.
+The Canadian boys sent over a few bombs instead, for they did not know the
+words of the second verse! Not to know the second verse seems to be one of
+the idiosyncrasies of the peoples of all nations, bar the German!
+
+Should we get tired of singing, we would shout across to the enemy
+trenches. We would ask pertinent questions about their commanders and
+impertinent ones about the affairs of their nation. One thing I can say for
+Hans--he is never slow in answering. His repartee may be clumsy, but it is
+prompt and usually effective.
+
+We would inquire after the health of old "Von Woodenburg," old "One
+O'clock," the "Clown Prince," or "One Bumstuff." Hans would take this in a
+jocular way, slamming back something about Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Lloyd
+George, or Sir Sham Shoes, but when we really wanted to get Fritz's goat we
+would tease him about the Kaiser.
+
+We would shout "_Gott strafe der Kaiser!_" That would put them up in the
+air higher than a balloon. We would feel like getting out and hitting one
+another, but we dare not even raise a finger because a sniper would take it
+off. But after a lull there is always a storm, so before many minutes a
+bullet would go "crack," which would be the signal for thousands of rifles
+on both sides to commence an incessant firing. All this over nothing, and
+nobody getting hurt.
+
+It put me in mind of a couple of old women scrapping over a back-yard
+fence, and as we say back home, "all fussed up and no place to go."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+HELLO! SKY-PILOT!
+
+
+At the outset of the war there was much speculation as to the response the
+Lion's cubs would make to the call for help. Britain, herself, never
+doubted that her children, now fully grown and very strong, would rally to
+the old flag as in the earlier days of their greater dependency. But
+Britain, England, is of the Brer Rabbit type--she sits still and says
+nuffin'.
+
+The neutrals speculated on the attitude of Canada. German propaganda had
+been busy, and certain sections of the Canadian public had been heard to
+say that they had no part with England--but that was before the war. The
+speculative neutral had a shock and a disappointment. Not a Canadian, man
+or woman, but remembered that England was "home," and home was threatened.
+As one man they answered the short sharp cry.
+
+Australia, New Zealand and South Africa provided food for conversation
+among the nations then not engaged in the fight. South Africa had a rising,
+fostered by German money and German lies, but it fizzled out before the
+determined attitude, not of England, but of the men who counted in South
+Africa itself. All of these countries, which used to be colonies, came
+without question when the need arose. They may have had minor disagreements
+with the Old Country, they may have resented the last lingering parental
+attitude of the Motherland, but let any one touch as an enemy that
+Motherland and that enemy had well have cried, "Peccavi!" on the moment.
+
+Above all, the neutrals wondered about India. That vast Far Eastern Empire
+with her millions of men--what would India do?
+
+What did India do? The maharajahs threw into the coffers of the homeland
+millions of money, they threw in jewels in quantity to be judged by weight
+of hundreds, in value to be judged in millions of pounds. They offered
+their men and their lahks of rupees without reservation. The regular troops
+of the Eastern Empire, the Ghurkas, the Pathans, the Sikhs, a half dozen
+others, clamored to be taken over to Europe to fight at the front for the
+great White Chief.
+
+The Indian troops came to Europe, landed in France, and took up their stand
+on the western front. To them I must make special reference. Some idea may
+be abroad that because the Hindu troops are not still in France that they
+proved poor fighters. This is very far from the truth. The Indian regiments
+were among our best, but they could not stand the rigors of the European
+climate. They had been used to the warmth and brightness and dryness of
+their homeland; they came to cold and rain and mud and unknown discomforts.
+It was too much. Again, the Indian is made for open, hand-to-hand warfare.
+Give him a hill to climb and hold, give him a forest to crawl through and
+gain his point, give him open land to pass over without being seen, he can
+not be beaten. But the strain, mental and physical, of trench life was too
+much.
+
+To the Indian, war is a religion. One day I went down the line to where a
+body of Ghurkas were lying to our left. I walked along about a mile through
+the muddy ditches and at last came up with one of the men. I stopped and
+spoke, then offered him a fag. After this interchange of courtesies we
+fell into conversation. He did not know very much English, and I no
+Hindustani at all, but in a short time one of the Ghurka officers
+approached. The officers and men of these regiments are very friendly, more
+chummy almost than are our officers to our men. This officer acted as an
+interpreter, and together they told me much that I was anxious to know.
+
+After a little I asked the Ghurka to show me his knife, but he would not.
+The Ghurka knife is a weapon of wonderful grace. It is short and sharpened
+on both edges, while it is broad and curved almost to the angle of a
+sickle. It is used in a flat sweeping movement, which, when wielded by an
+expert, severs a limb or a head at one blow. I was told that at twenty
+yards, when they throw it, they never miss.
+
+At last, through the agency of the officer, I found that it is against all
+the laws of battle for a soldier of this clan to remove his knife from the
+scabbard unless he draws blood with the naked blade. The unfailing courtesy
+of the Hindu forbade a continued refusal, and as I urged him the soldier
+at last slowly drew the blade from its sheath. He did not raise it for me
+to examine, nor did he lift his eyes to mine until he had pricked his hand
+between the thumb and first finger and raised a jet of his own red blood.
+Then only did I have the privilege of looking at his treasured weapon.
+
+The Hindu warrior believes that to die in battle is to win at once a
+coveted eternity in Erewohne. He does not wish to be merely wounded, he
+desires death in fight rather than immunity from injury. He does not evade
+danger; rather he seeks it.
+
+Shortly after this, at the great battle of Neuve Chapelle, where the
+British took over five miles of trenches and four miles of front from the
+enemy, the Hindu troops distinguished themselves in magnificent charges.
+They leaped out of the trenches almost before the word of command had
+reached their hearing. Fleet of foot and lithe of action, they had sprung
+into the enemy trenches and slashed the Hun to submission before the
+heavier white men had got across the intervening country. They were
+wonderful, full of dash and courage, but the difficulties of the situation
+called for an alteration of their fighting _milieu_.
+
+Feeding these troops also was a matter of considerable moment. Their
+religion forbade the eating of any meat but that of the goat. These animals
+must be freshly killed and must be killed by the Hindu himself. This
+entailed the bringing up to the line of herds of live goats. In addition,
+many other formalities of food supply had to be taken into account.
+
+With the most fervent thanks for the good work done on our western front,
+the authorities came to the conclusion that our cousins of the East would
+be even greater in service on one of our other fronts. They have gone since
+to Egypt, to Saloniki, to Mesopotamia, and to the East and West African
+fronts. They are playing a magnificent and unforgetable part in the world
+war. They have endeared themselves to the hearts of the folks at home and
+they have earned the lasting gratitude of all of us. They have defended
+their section of the empire as we have defended our northern part of the
+red splotches which mark Britain on the map.
+
+I was sorry that the Indian regiments had to be removed from the west
+front, because, undoubtedly, they were the most feared by the Hun. The
+Indian was at his best in a charge, but at night he had an uneasy habit of
+crawling out of the trench toward Fritz, with his knife held firmly between
+his teeth. Before dawn he would return, his knife still in his teeth, but
+in his hand a German head.
+
+To-day the Canadians in France are known by the enemy as the "white
+Ghurkas," and this, to us, is one of the highest compliments. The Ghurkas
+are considered bravest of the brave. Shall we not be proud to share a title
+such as this?
+
+As the religion of the Ghurka follows him to the battle-field, so in a
+different sense does the religion of the white man. We have our thoughts,
+our hopes and our aspirations. Some of us have our Bibles and our
+prayer-books, some of us have rosaries and crucifixes. All of us have deep
+in our hearts love, veneration and respect for the sky-pilot--chaplain, if
+you would rather call him so. To us sky-pilot, and very truly so, the man
+who not only points the way to higher things, but the man who travels with
+us over the rough road which leads to peace in our innermost selves.
+
+It does not matter of what sect or of what denomination these men may be.
+Out on the battle-field there are Anglican clergy, there are Roman
+Catholic priests, there are ministers of the Presbyterian, the Methodist,
+the Baptist and other non-conformist faiths. Creed and doctrine play no
+part when men are gasping out a dying breath and the last message home. The
+chaplain carries in his heart the comfort for the man who is facing
+eternity. We do not want to die. We are all strong and full of life and
+hope and power of doing. Suddenly we are stricken beyond mortal aid. The
+chaplain comes and in a few phrases gives us the password, the sign which
+admits us to the peaceful Masonry of Christianity. Rough men pass away,
+hard men "go West" with a smile of peace upon their pain-tortured lips if
+the padre can get to them in time for the parting word, the cheerful,
+colloquial "best o' luck."
+
+Does the padre come to us and sanctimoniously pronounce our eternal doom
+should he hear us swear? The clergyman, the minister of old time, is down
+and out when he reaches the battle-fields of France, or any other of the
+fronts we are holding. No stupid tracts are handed to us, no whining and
+groaning, no morbid comments on the possibility of eternal damnation. No,
+the chaplain of to-day is a real man, maybe he always was, I don't know. A
+man who risks his life as do we who are in the fighting line. He has
+services, talks, addresses, but he never preaches. He practises all the
+time.
+
+Out of this war there will come a new religion. It won't be a sin any more
+to sing rag-time on Sunday, as it was in the days of my childhood. It won't
+be a sin to play a game on Sunday. After church parade in France we rushed
+to the playing fields behind the lines, and many a time I've seen the
+chaplain umpire the ball game. Many a time I've seen him take a hand in a
+friendly game of poker. The man who goes to France to-day will come back
+with a broadened mind, be he a chaplain or be he a fighter. There is no
+room for narrowness, for dogma or for the tenets of old-time theology. This
+is a man-size business, and in every department men are meeting the
+situation as real men should.
+
+Again, at Neuve Chapelle, there was magnificent bravery. Just across the
+street, at a turn, there lay a number of wounded men. They were absolutely
+beyond the reach of succor. A terrible machine gun fire swept the roadway
+between them and a shelter of sandbags, which had hastily been put up on
+one side of the street. By these sandbags a sergeant had been placed on
+guard with strictest orders to forbid the passing of any one, without
+exception, toward the area where the wounded lay. It was certain death to
+permit it. We had no men to spare, we had no men to lose, we had to
+conserve every one of our effectives.
+
+As time wore on and the enemy fire grew hotter, a Roman Catholic chaplain
+reached the side of the sergeant. "Sergeant, I want to go over to the aid
+of those wounded men."
+
+"No, sir, my orders are absolutely strict. I am to let no one go across, no
+matter what his rank."
+
+The chaplain considered a moment, but he did not move from where he stood
+beside the sergeant.
+
+A minute passed and a chaplain of the Presbyterian faith came up.
+"Sergeant, I want to go across to those men. They are in a bad way."
+
+"I know, sir. Sorry, sir. Strict orders that no one must be allowed to
+pass."
+
+"Who are your orders from?"
+
+"High authority, sir."
+
+"Ah!" The padre looked at the sergeant....
+
+"Sorry, Sergeant, but I have orders from a Higher Authority," and the
+Presbyterian minister rushed across the bullet-swept area. He fell dead
+before he reached his objective.
+
+"I, too, have orders from a Higher Authority," said the Roman Catholic
+priest, and he dashed out into the roadway. He fell, dead, close by the
+body of his Protestant brother. They had not reached the wounded, but
+Heaven is witness that their death was the death of men.
+
+Hand in hand with the chaplains at the front is the Y.M.C.A. It is doing a
+marvelous work among the troops. The Y.M.C.A. huts are scattered all over
+the fighting front. Here you will find the padre with his coat off engaged
+in the real "shirt-sleeve" religion of the trenches. Here there are all
+possible comforts, even little luxuries for the boys. Here are
+concerts,--the best and best-known artists come out and give their services
+to cheer up Tommy. Here the padres will hold five or six services in an
+evening for the benefit of the five or six relays of men who can attend.
+Here are checker-boards, chess sets, cards, games of all sorts. Here is a
+miniature departmental store where footballs, mouth organs, pins, needles,
+buttons, cotton, everything can be bought.
+
+"What's the place wid the red triangle?" asked the Irish soldier, lately
+joined up and only out, from a Scotch-Canadian who stood near by.
+
+"Yon? D'ye mean to say ye dinna know the meaning o' thon? Why, mon, yon's
+the place whaur ye get a packet o' fags, a bar o' chocolate, a soft drink
+and salvation for twenty-five cents."
+
+Yes; we get all that in the Y.M.C.A. huts where the padre toils and the
+layman sweats day and night for the well-being of the soldier men. In some
+of the huts it is actually possible to get a bath. It is always possible to
+get dry. 'Twas Black Jack Vowel, good friend Jack, who wrote over to tell
+us that there was no hut at one time near his front.
+
+    "Bad luck here, this time in. No Y.M.C.A. hut near. I was coming
+    out last night for a turn in billets when I fell into a shell
+    hole. It was pretty near full of water, so I got soaked to the
+    neck, and I hit against a couple of dead Boches in it, too. Not
+    nice. Reached the billet dripping wet. Have got a couple of sugar
+    boxes, one at my head and one at my feet. Have coke brazier
+    underneath. If I lie here about three hours and keep turning, I
+    guess I'll be dry by then."
+
+That's when no padre was handy to lead the way to a hut.
+
+Can folk wonder why we love the padres, why we reverence the Y.M.C.A.? Can
+folk wonder why the men who used to look on such men as sissy-boys have
+changed their opinions? Can folk wonder that the religion which is
+Christian is making an impression on the soldier? Can folk deny the fact
+that this war will make better men?
+
+Once again I mention Major the Reverend John Pringle. Best of pals, best of
+sports, best of sky-pilots! Many a time as we have been marching along we
+have met him. He would pick out a face from among the crowd, maybe a
+British Columbia man. "Hello! salmon-belly!" would good Major John peal
+out. Again, he would see a Nova Scotian: "Hello! fish-eater--hello,
+blue-nose!"
+
+Then through us all would go a rush of good feeling and good heart.
+Through all of us would go a stream of courage and happiness and a desire
+to stand right with the man as he was.
+
+"Hello! Sky-pilot!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+VIVE LA FRANCE ET AL BELGE!
+
+
+We had only been about ten weeks in France when we were moved out of the
+trenches and placed in Ypres in billets. Some of us were actually billeted
+in the city itself, and others of us had a domicil in the environs.
+
+Ypres, or Wipers, as Tommy Atkins called it, was then considered a "hot"
+spot. The Germans say no one ever comes back from Ypres without a hole in
+him. Tommy says, when he curses, "Oh, go to ----; you can't last any longer
+than a snow ball in Ypres!"
+
+At this time Ypres was not yet destroyed by the enemy. I have seen many
+cities of the world. I have seen the beauties of Westminster Abbey, the Law
+Courts; I have seen the tropical wonders of the West Indies; I have seen
+the marvels of the Canadian Rockies, but I have never seen greater beauty
+of architecture and form than in the city of Ypres. There was the Cloth
+Hall, La Salle des Draperies with its massive pillars, its delicate
+traceries, its Gothic windows and its air of age-long gray-toned serenity.
+
+There was Ypres Cathedral! A place of silence that breathed of Heaven
+itself. There was its superb bell tower, and its peal of silver-tongued
+chimes. There were wonderful Old World houses, quaint steps and turns and
+alleys. It was a city of delight, a city that charmed and awed by its
+impressive grandeur.
+
+Now the city was massed with refugees from the ravaged parts of Belgium. In
+peace times possibly the population would have numbered thirty-five to
+forty thousand, at this time it seemed that sixty thousand souls were
+crowded into the city limits. Every house, every _estaminet_, every barn,
+every stable was filled to its capacity with folk who had fled in despair
+before the cloven hoof of the advancing Hun.
+
+Glance at the map on page 142 and judge of the condition of a city
+practically surrounded on all sides by the enemy. Three miles away to the
+left, three miles away to the right, and a matter of only ten miles away
+from the immediate front of the city. For months the Germans had shelled
+the town every day. Not with a continued violence, but with a continued,
+systematic irritation which played havoc with the strongest nerves. Not a
+day passed that two or three women, or half a dozen children or babies did
+not pay the toll to the war god's lust of blood.
+
+But still the people remained in the city. There was no alternative.
+Conditions behind Ypres were just the same, and all the way back to Calais.
+Every town and every village, every hamlet and every farm had its quota of
+refugees. Here they stayed and waited grimly for the day of liberation.
+
+One day I walked out from Ypres a few miles. I came to the village of
+Vlamentinge. I went into an _estaminet_ and called for some refreshment.
+From among the crowd of soldiers gathered there a civilian Belgian made his
+way over to me. He was crippled or he would not have been in civilian
+clothes.
+
+"Hello, old boy!" he said to me in perfect English. "How are you?"
+
+I replied, but must have looked my astonishment at his knowledge of my
+language, for he went on to explain.
+
+"I got over from the States just the week war broke out. I worked in North
+Dakota, and had saved up and planned to come over and marry my sweetheart,
+who waited in Brussels for me. I have not seen her. She must be lost in the
+passing of the enemy. I have gathered a very little money, enough to start
+on the small farm which is my inheritance. Come and see it--come and have
+dinner with me."
+
+I accepted his invitation, and we walked over together. The Belgian spoke
+all the way of his fine property and good farm. All the while there was a
+twinkle in his eye, and at last I asked him what size was his great farm.
+
+"Ten acres," said he, and laughed at my amazement at so small a holding.
+
+We reached the house, which proved to be a three-roomed shack. In a little,
+dinner was served and we went in to sit down. Not only the owner and
+myself, but fifteen others sat down to a meal of weak soup and war bread.
+The other guests at the table were fourteen old women and one young girl.
+They sat in a steady brooding silence. I asked the Belgian if they
+understood English. They did not, and so I questioned him.
+
+"Very big family this you've got," I remarked. I knew what they were, but
+just wanted to draw him out.
+
+"Oh, they're not my family."
+
+"Only visitors?" I queried.
+
+"Darned good visitors," said he, "they've been here since the second week
+of August, 1914."
+
+"Refugees--" I commented.
+
+"Yes, refugees, not one with a home. Not one who has not lost her husband,
+her son or her grandson. Not one who has not lost every bit of small
+property, but her clothes as well. You think that I am doing something to
+help? Well, that is not much. I'm lucky with the few I have. There's my old
+neighbor over yonder on the hill. He owns five acres and has a two-roomed
+shack and he keeps eleven."
+
+"And how long do you expect them to stay?"
+
+"Why, laddie," said he. "Stay--how should I know? I was talking to an
+officer the other day and he told me he believed the first ten years of
+this war would be the worst. They are free and welcome to stay all that
+time, and longer if need be. They are my people. They are Belgians. We have
+not much. My savings are going rapidly, but we have set a few potatoes"--he
+waved his hand over to where four of the old women were hoeing the ground.
+"We get bread and a little soup; we have enough to wear for now. We shall
+manage."
+
+That is only one instance in my own personal experience. Every place was
+the same. The people who could, sheltered those that had lost all. It was a
+case of share and share alike. If one man had a crust and his neighbor
+none, why then each had half a crust without questions.
+
+It is for Belgium. It is to-day, in the midst of war and pillage and
+outrage, that man is learning the brotherhood of man. In peace times no man
+would have imagined the possibility of sharing his home and income, no
+matter how great it might have been, with fifteen other persons. The
+fifteen unfortunates would have been left to the tender mercies of a
+precarious and grudging charity. To-day, charity is dead in its old
+accepted sense of doling out a few pence to the needy; to-day, charity is
+imbued with the spirit of Him who, to the few said, "I was hungered and you
+gave me meat."
+
+To-day, it is not necessary to go to Ypres, to Namur, to Liége, to Verdun,
+or to any of the bombarded cities of Belgium and France to see the ruin
+that has been wrought by war among the people. It is the populace who
+suffer, even in greater degree than do the fighting men. They must give way
+in every instance before the irresistible barrier of martial law. It is the
+old men, the women, the children, the babies and the physically imperfect
+who must bear the brunt of dreadfulness.
+
+Go to any of the cities of France, a hundred or more miles from the firing
+line. Go to Rouen, to Paris, to the smaller inland towns, to St. Omer, to
+Aubreville, and there is war.
+
+The streets and boulevards, which a few years since were gay with a
+laughing crowd of joyous-hearted men and women, youths and maidens, to-day
+are gloomy, with the shadow of sorrow and death on them. On a conservative
+estimate it will be found that in all the towns and cities of France, one
+in three women will be dressed in black.
+
+The French woman carries through life the tradition of the veil. She is
+christened, and over her baby face there lies a white veil. She is
+confirmed, and a veil drapes her childish head. She is married, and a
+trailing lace veil half conceals her happy smiles. She mourns, and a heavy
+veil of black crape covers her from head to foot.
+
+We of the Canadians learned to know the wonderful emotion of the French. As
+we marched along the streets we would see a Frenchwoman approaching us. She
+recognized the strange uniform of an Ally and her eyes would sparkle, and
+perchance she'd greet us with a fluttering handkerchief. The shadow of a
+smile would cross her face; she was glad to see us; she wanted to welcome
+us. And then she would remember, remember that she had lost her man--her
+husband, her son, her sweetheart. He had been just as we, strong and
+virile. He had gone forth to a victory that now he was never to see on
+earth. His had been the supreme sacrifice. She would pass us, and the tears
+would come to her eyes, and we'd salute those tears--for France.
+
+[Illustration: Over the top]
+
+And the men, what of them? There are no men. You will see old men, shaken
+and weak; possibly they have experienced the German as he was in 1870, and
+they know. You will see boys, eager strong boys, who impatiently await the
+call to arms. You will see young men who now look old. You will see them
+blind, and led about by a younger brother or sister. You will see the
+permanently crippled and those that wait for death, a slow and lingering
+death from the Hun's poisonous gases.
+
+[Illustration: With the best of luck]
+
+It is no uncommon sight to see the peasantry of France and Belgium, the old
+and young women, the children and the very old men, working in their fields
+and on their tiny farms, less than a mile from the trenches. It is their
+home. It is France or it is Belgium, and love of country and that which is
+theirs is stronger than fear of death. Some one of them may be blown to
+pieces as he works; it makes no difference. They do not leave as long as it
+is possible to remain, or as long as the Allied armies will permit them to
+stay.
+
+Their houses may be leveled, they may only find shelter in a half ruined
+cellar. Often they may go hungry, but always there is a grim determination
+to stick to their own, to till the ground which has kept them, which has
+kept their parents and great-grandparents, and which they mean shall keep
+their children when victory, which they know is inevitable, is complete.
+
+They have a wonderful faith.
+
+The casualties of the French army have never been made public. We do not
+know them. It may be that they will never be told to a curious world.
+France may have had her body crushed almost beyond endurance, but the
+unspeakable Hun--the barbarian, the crusher of hope and love and
+ideals--has not even made a dent on the wonderful spirit of France.
+
+France is superb. In the parlance of the man in the street, we all "take
+off our hats" to this valiant country.
+
+I could tell of the most horrible things possible for human mind to
+conceive. I have seen things that, put in type, would sicken the reader. I
+do not want to tell of these things here, evidence of them can be had from
+any official document or blue-book. And yet, in justice to Belgium, I must
+tell some of the least dreadful of the things I have seen and only those
+that have come to me through personal experience. I do not tell from
+hearsay, and I tell the truth without exaggeration.
+
+In common with thousands of other Canadian and Imperial soldiers I saw the
+evacuation and destruction of Ypres. On the morning of April 21, 1915, we
+marched along the Ypres-Menin road, which road was the key to Calais, to
+Paris, to London and to New York. We marched along in the early hours of
+the morning, just after dawn. To our left passed a continuous stream of
+refugees. We looked toward them as we went by. We saluted as they passed,
+but many of us had dimmed vision.
+
+We had heard of German atrocities. We had seen an isolated case or two as
+we marched from town to town and village to village. We had not paid a
+great deal of attention to them, as we had considered such things the work
+of some drunken German soldier who had run riot and defied the orders of
+the officers. Though we had certainly seen one or more cases that had
+impressed us very deeply. The case I cited earlier in this book never left
+my thoughts. But here on the king's highway, we saw German atrocities on
+exhibition for the first time. I say exhibition, and public exhibition,
+because it was the first time we had seen atrocities in bulk--in
+numbers--in hundreds.
+
+Ypres had been destroyed in seven hours, after a continuous bombardment
+from one thousand German guns. It was a city of the dead. The military
+authorities of the Allies told the civilians they must leave. They had to
+go, there was no alternative. The liberation they had hoped for was in
+sight, but their road to it was of a roughness unspeakable.
+
+There was the grandfather in that procession, and the
+grandmother,--sometimes she was a crippled old body who could not walk.
+Sometimes she was wheeled in a barrow surrounded by a few bundles of
+household treasure. Sometimes a British wagon would pass piled high with
+old women and sick, to whom the soldiers were giving a lift on their way.
+
+There was the mother in that procession. Sometimes she would have a bundle,
+sometimes she would have a basket with a few broken pieces of food. There
+was a young child, the baby hardly able to toddle and clinging to the
+mother's skirts. There was the young brother, the little fellow, whimpering
+a little perhaps at the noise and confusion and terror which his tiny
+brain could not grasp. There was the baby, the baby which used to be plump
+and smiling and round and pinky white, now held convulsively by the mother
+to her breast, its little form thin and worn because of lack of
+nourishment.
+
+There was no means of feeding these thousands of helpless ones. Their only
+means of sustenance was from the charity of the British and French
+soldiers, who shared rations with them.
+
+And there was sister, the daughter--sister--sister. At sight of these young
+girls--from thirteen up to twenty and over--we learned, if we had not
+learned before, that this is a war in which every decent man must fight.
+Some Americans and Canadians may not want to go overseas; they may be
+opposed to fighting; they may think they are not needed. Let them once see
+what we saw that April morning and nothing in the world could keep them at
+home.
+
+They dragged along with heads low, and eyes seeking the ground in a shame
+not of their own making. I am conservative when I say that one in four of
+the hundreds of young girls who walked along in that sad crowd had a baby,
+or was about to have one.
+
+And that was not the only horror of their situation. Many of them had one
+or the other arm off at the elbow. They had not only been ruined, but
+mutilated by their barbarous enemies.
+
+That evening we camped just outside the city of Ypres. We rested all night,
+and the next day we went into action. During the afternoon of April
+twenty-second the Germans, for the first time in the history of warfare,
+used poisonous gas. And they used it against us as we lay there ready to
+protect the Ypres salient.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+CANADIANS--THAT'S ALL
+
+
+Less than three months before this we were raw recruits. We were considered
+greenhorns and absolutely undisciplined. We had had little of trench
+experience. At Neuve Chapelle we had "stood by." At Hill 60 we had watched
+the fun. But our discipline, our real mettle, had not yet been put to the
+test.
+
+That evening of the twenty-second of April when we marched out from Ypres,
+little did any of us realize that within the next twenty-four hours more
+than one-half of our total effectives were to be no more.
+
+I feel sure that our commanders must have been nervous. They must have
+wondered and asked themselves, "Will the boys stand it?" "How will they
+come out of the test?"
+
+We were about to be thrown into the fiercest and bitterest battle of the
+war. There were no other troops within several days' march of us. There
+was no one to back us up. There was no one else, should we fail, to take
+our place. "Canadians! It's up to you!"
+
+I could tell of several stirring things that happened to other battalions
+during that night, but I am only telling of what I saw myself, and it will
+suffice to write of one most stirring thing which befell the Third.
+
+As we crossed the Yser Canal we marched in a dogged and resolute silence.
+No man can tell what were the thoughts of his comrade. We have no bands,
+nor bugles, nor music when marching into action. We dare not even smoke. In
+dark and quiet we pass steadily ahead. There is only the continued muffled
+tramp--tramp--of hundreds of feet encased in heavy boots.
+
+To the far right of us and to the far left shells were falling, bursting
+and brilliantly lighting up the heavens for a lurid moment. In our
+immediate sector there were no shells. It was all the more dark and all the
+more silent, for the noise and uproar and blazing flame to right and left.
+
+We were on rising ground now. Up and up steadily we went. We reached the
+top of the grade, when suddenly from out of the pit of darkness ahead of
+us there came a high explosive shell. It dropped in the middle of our
+battalion. It struck where the machine gun section was placed, and
+annihilated them almost to a man.
+
+Then it was that our mettle stood the test. Then it was that we proved the
+words Canadian and Man synonymous. Not one of us wavered; not one of us
+swerved to right or left, to front or back. We kept on. There was hardly
+one who lost in step. The commanders whispered in the darkness, "Close up
+the ranks." The men behind those who had fallen jumped across the bodies of
+their comrades lying prone, and joined in immediately behind those in the
+forward rows.
+
+The dead and wounded lay stretched where they had fallen. Coming behind us
+were the stretcher-bearers and the hospital corps. We knew our comrades
+would have attention. This was a grim business. We pressed on.
+
+There was a supreme test of discipline. It was our weighing time in the
+balance of the world war, and we proved ourselves not wanting. We were
+Canadians--that's all.
+
+That afternoon the gas came over on us. The Germans put gas across on us
+because they hated us most. It is a compliment to be hated by the Germans.
+Extreme hatred from a German in the field shows that the hated are the most
+effective. They hated the French most at first, they hated the Imperial
+British, they hated us; they have hated the English again; soon, when the
+United States comes to her full effectiveness, she will take her place in
+the front rank of the hated.
+
+We Canadians were a puzzle to them. When we went into the trenches at
+first, the enemy would call across the line to us, "What have you come over
+here to fight us for? What business is it of yours? Why did you not stay
+back home in Canada and attend to your own affairs, and not butt into
+something that does not concern you? If you had stayed at home in your own
+country, WHEN WE CAME OVER AND TOOK CANADA, we would have treated you all
+right. Now that you have interfered, we are going to get you some day and
+get you right."
+
+Yes; when they came over and took Canada. That was the very reason we were
+fighting. We wanted to keep our own part of the empire for ourselves. It
+is ours absolutely, and we had no intention that Germany should own it. We
+knew exactly what the Hohenzollern planned to do. If France were subdued,
+if England were beaten on her own ground, then Canada would be a prize of
+war. We preferred to fight overseas, in a country which already had been
+devastated, rather than carry ruin and devastation into our own land, where
+alone we would not have had the slightest chance in the world for beating
+Germany.
+
+In the front lines of the Ypres salient was the Third Brigade, made up of
+Canadian Highlanders, whom the Germans, since that night have nicknamed
+"The Ladies from Hell." In this brigade were men from parts of Nova Scotia,
+Montreal, from Hamilton, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver.
+
+To the left of these lay the Second Brigade of Infantry. These were men for
+the most part from the West. There was the Fifth, commonly known as the
+"Disappointed Fifth," from Regina, Moose Jaw and Saskatoon. There was the
+Eighth, nicknamed by the Germans "The Little Black Devils from Winnipeg."
+The Tenth, the famous "Fighting Tenth," with boys from Southern Alberta,
+mainly Medicine Hat and Calgary and Lethbridge. And there was the Seventh
+of British Columbia.
+
+[Illustration: POSITIONS BEFORE AND AFTER SECOND BATTLE OF YPRES APRIL
+1915]
+
+It was the Second Brigade which the First was supporting. To the left of
+the Eighth Battalion, which was the extreme Canadian left wing, there were
+Zouaves and Turcos. These were black French Colonials. To these
+unfortunates, probably the Canadians owe their near disaster.
+
+In the far distance we saw a cloud rise as though from the earth. It was a
+greeny-red color, and increased in volume as it rolled forward. It was like
+a mist rising, and yet it hugged the ground, rose five or six feet, and
+penetrated to every crevice and dip in the ground.
+
+We could not tell what it was. Suddenly from out the mist we men in
+reserves saw movement. Coming toward us, running as though Hell as it
+really was had been let loose behind them, were the black troops from
+Northern Africa. Poor devils, I do not blame them. It was enough to make
+any man run. They were simple-minded fellows. They were there to fight for
+France, but their minds could not grasp the significance of the enemy
+against whom they were pitted. The gas rolled on and they fled. Their
+officers vainly tried to stem the flying tide of them. Their heels barely
+seemed to touch the ground. As they ran they covered their faces, noses and
+eyes with their hands, and through blackened lips, sometimes cracked and
+bleeding, they gasped, "Allemands! Allemands!"
+
+Some of our own French-speaking officers stopped the few running men they
+could make hear, and begged of them to reform their lines and go back to
+the attack. But they were maddened as only a simple race can be frenzied by
+fear, and paid no heed.
+
+It is in times like this, in moments of dire emergency, that the officer of
+true worth stands out, the real leader of men. There were a dozen incidents
+to prove this in the next few hurried, desperate moments. None can be more
+soul-stirring than the quick thought, quick action and foresight displayed
+by our own captain. He did not know what this smoke rushing toward our
+lines could be. He had no idea more definite than any of us in the ranks.
+But he had that quick brain that acts automatically in an emergency and
+thinks afterward.
+
+"Wet your handkerchiefs in your water-bottles, boys!" he ordered.
+
+We all obeyed promptly.
+
+"Put the handkerchiefs over your faces--and shoot like the devil!" he
+panted.
+
+We did this, and as the gas got closer, the handkerchiefs served as a sort
+of temporary respirator and saved many of us from a frightful death. We in
+the reserves suffered least. Yet some of us died by that infernal product.
+A man dies by gas in horrible torment. He turns perfectly black, those men
+at any rate whom I saw at that time. Black as black leather, eyes, even
+lips, teeth, nails. He foams at the mouth as a dog in hydrophobia; he
+lingers five or six minutes and then--goes West.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Marvelous is the only word to describe the endurance, the valor of the
+Ladies from Hell. They withstood the gas, and they withstood wave after
+wave of attacking German hordes. And yet even their wonderful work was
+overtopped by that of the Eighth, which, being exposed on the left by the
+black troops who had fled, had to bear the brunt of a fight which almost
+surrounded them.
+
+It was wonderful. I shall never forget it. There were twelve thousand
+Canadian troops. In the German official reports after the battle, they
+stated that they had used one hundred and twenty thousand men against us,
+and one thousand guns. We had not one gun. Those that we had were captured
+when the African blacks had left. It was our strength against theirs--no,
+it was white man's spirit against barbarian brutality.
+
+For six days and nights that terrible death struggle continued. Every man
+was engaged: cooks, doctors, stretcher-bearers, chaplains, every one of us
+held a rifle. The wounded who had to take their chance of living because
+there was no way to convey them back to shelter--some of them would sit up,
+if they possibly could, to load and load again rifles which they lifted
+from dead comrades. They would hand us these as our rifles got too hot to
+hold. And still the German attacks persisted. Still they came on. And still
+we did not budge an inch from our position as it was when the gas first
+came over. They did not gain a yard, though when the British reserves at
+last reached us, there were only two thousand of us left standing on our
+feet; two thousand of us who were whole from out the twelve thousand that
+had started in to repel the attack.
+
+The two thousand of us were still in the old position. Still we held in our
+safe-keeping the key of the road to Calais, to Paris, to London and
+farther. The key to world power which the Hohenzollern coveted.
+
+Behind Ypres to-day there lie four thousand five hundred of the flower of
+the Canadian contingent. Four thousand five hundred young men who made the
+extreme sacrifice for King, for Flag, for Country, for Right. They lie in
+their narrow beds of earth, and over them wave the shading leaves of maple
+trees. For thoughtful citizens sent over and had planted "Canada's little
+maple grove"--a monument in a strange country to the men who fought and
+died and were not defeated.
+
+On the night of April twenty-second, General Alderson and his officers saw
+that the situation was desperate. They thought to save their men. The
+general sent up the command: "Retire!"
+
+The word first reached the Little Black Devils. The men heard it, the
+officers heard it, and they looked over the flattened parapet of their
+trench. They saw the oncoming hordes of brutes in a hellish-looking garb,
+and they sent back the answer: "Retire be damned!"
+
+The general, the officers, rested content. With a spirit such as these men
+showed even against desperate odds, nothing but victory could result.
+
+The gas and the attacking waves of men poured on. We were not frightened.
+No; none of us showed fear. Warfare such as this does not scare men with
+red blood in their veins. The Germans judge others by themselves. A German
+can be scared, a German can be bluffed. They thought that we were of the
+same mettle, or lesser. At the Somme we put over on the enemy the only new
+thing that we have been able to spring during the whole three years--the
+tanks. Were they scared? They were terrified! They dropped rifles,
+bayonets, knapsacks, everything--and ran. Had not our tanks stuck in the
+awful mud of France, or had they a trifle more speed, I believe it might
+have been possible for us to have reached Berlin by this time.
+
+It was because we could not be frightened that General French, then
+Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, cabled across the
+world on the morning of the twenty-third of April, "The Canadians
+undoubtedly saved the situation."
+
+No word of definite praise, no eulogy, no encomiums. Just six words--"The
+Canadians undoubtedly saved the situation."
+
+The night of April twenty-second was probably the most momentous time of
+the six days and nights of fighting. Then the Germans concentrated on the
+Yser Canal, over which there was but one bridge, a murderous barrage fire
+which would have effectively hindered the bringing up of reinforcements or
+guns, even had we had any in reserve.
+
+During the early stages of the battle, the enemy had succeeded to
+considerable degree in turning the Canadian left wing. There was a large
+open gap at this point, where the French Colonial troops had stood until
+the gas came over. Toward this sector the Germans rushed rank after rank of
+infantry, backed by guns and heavy artillery. To the far distant left were
+our British comrades. They were completely blocked by the German advance.
+They were like rats in a trap and could not move.
+
+At the start of the battle, the Canadian lines ran from the village of
+Langemarcke over to St. Julien, a distance of approximately three to four
+miles. From St. Julien to the sector where the Imperial British had joined
+the Turcos was a distance of probably two miles.
+
+These two miles had to be covered and covered quickly. We had to save the
+British extreme right wing, and we had to close the gap. There was no
+question about it. It was our job. On the night of April twenty-second we
+commenced to put this into effect. We were still holding our original
+position with the handful of men who were in reserves, all of whom had been
+included in the original grand total of twelve thousand. We had to spread
+out across the gap of two miles and link up the British right wing.
+
+Doing this was no easy task. Our company was out first and we were told to
+get into field skirmishing order. We lined up in the pitchy darkness at
+five paces apart, but no sooner had we reached this than a whispered order
+passed from man to man: "Another pace, lads, just another pace."
+
+This order came again and yet again. Before we were through and ready for
+the command to advance, we were at least twice five paces each man from his
+nearest comrade.
+
+Then it was that our captain told us bluntly that we were obviously
+outnumbered by the Germans, ten to one. Then he told us that practically
+speaking, we had scarcely the ghost of a chance, but that a bluff might
+succeed. He told us to "swing the lid over them." This we did by yelling,
+hooting, shouting, clamoring, until it seemed, and the enemy believed,
+that we were ten to their one.
+
+[Illustration: LINES AS THEY APPEARED, APRIL 24 BADLY BENT BUT NOT BROKEN]
+
+The ruse succeeded. At daybreak when we rested we found that we had driven
+the enemy back almost to his original position. All night long we had been
+fighting with our backs to our comrades who were in the front trenches. The
+enemy had got behind us and we had had to face about in what served for
+trenches. By dawn we had him back again in his original position, and we
+were facing in the old direction. By dawn we had almost, though not quite,
+forced a junction with the British right.
+
+The night of April twenty-second is one that I can never forget. It was
+frightful, yes. Yet there was a grandeur in the appalling intensity of
+living, in the appalling intensity of death as it surrounded us.
+
+The German shells rose and burst behind us. They made the Yser Canal a
+stream of molten glory. Shells fell in the city, and split the darkness of
+the heavens in the early night hours. Later the moon rose in a splendor of
+spring-time. Straight behind the tower of the great cathedral it rose and
+shone down on a bloody earth.
+
+Suddenly the grand old Cloth Hall burst into flames. The spikes of fire
+rose and fell and rose again. Showers of sparks went upward. A pall of
+smoke would form and cloud the moon, waver, break and pass. There was the
+mutter and rumble and roar of great guns. There was the groan of wounded
+and the gasp of dying.
+
+It was glorious. It was terrible. It was inspiring. Through an inferno of
+destruction and death, of murder and horror, we lived because we must.
+
+Early in the night the Fighting Tenth and the Sixteenth charged the wood
+of St. Julien. Through the undergrowth they hacked and hewed and fought and
+bled and died. But, outnumbered as they were, they got the position and
+captured the battery of 4.7 guns that had been lost earlier in the day.
+
+This night the Germans caught and crucified three of our Canadian
+sergeants. I did not see them crucify the men, although I saw one of the
+dead bodies after. I saw the marks of bayonets through the palms of the
+hands and the feet, where by bayonet points this man had been spitted to a
+barn door. I was told that one of the sergeants was still alive when taken
+down, and before he died he gasped out to his saviors that when the Germans
+were raising him to be crucified, they muttered savagely in perfect
+English, "If we did not frighten you before, this time we will."
+
+I know a sergeant of Edmonton, Alberta, who has in his possession to-day
+the actual photographs of the crucified men taken before the dead bodies
+were removed from the barnside.
+
+Again I maintain that war frightfulness of this kind does not frighten real
+men. The news of the crucified men soon reached all of the ranks. It
+increased our hatred. It doubled our bitterness. It made us all the more
+eager to advance--to fight--to "get." We had to avenge our comrades.
+Vengeance is not yet complete.
+
+In the winter of 1914-1915 the Germans knew war. They had studied the game
+and not a move was unfamiliar to them. We were worse than novices. Even our
+generals could not in their knowledge compare with the expertness of those
+who carried out the enemy action according to a schedule probably laid down
+years before.
+
+We knew that on the day following the terrible night of April twenty-second
+we must continue the advance, that we dare not rest, that we must complete
+the junction with the right wing of the British troops. And the enemy knew
+it, too.
+
+We expected that the Germans would be entrenched possibly one hundred or
+even two hundred yards from our own position, but not so. His nearest
+entrenchment was easily a mile to a mile and a half across the open land
+from us.
+
+The reason for this distance was simple enough. We had succeeded in our
+bluff that we had many hundreds more of men than in reality was the case.
+The enemy calculated that had we this considerable number of troops we
+would capture his trenches, were he to take a position close in, with one
+short and mad rush. He further calculated that had we even a million men,
+he would have the best of us if we attempted to cross the long, open flat
+land in the face of his thousands of machine guns.
+
+April twenty-third was one of the blackest days in the annals of Canadian
+history in this war, and again it was one of the most glorious. That day we
+were given the task of retaking the greater part of the trenches which the
+Turco troops had lost the day preceding.
+
+We lay, my own battalion, easily a mile and a half from the German trench
+which was to be our objective. About six o'clock in the morning we set out
+very cautiously, with Major Kirkpatrick in command. C and D Companies were
+leading, with a platoon or two of B Company following, comprising in all
+about seven hundred and fifty men. At first we thought the advance would be
+comparatively easy, but when we entered the village of St. Julien, the
+German coal boxes were falling all around us. So far our casualties were
+light.
+
+To the left of the village we formed in field skirmishing order--about five
+paces apart--but before the formation of five successive lines or waves was
+completed, each man was easily eight paces away from his nearest mate
+instead of five. We were told that our objective was an enemy trench system
+about four hundred yards in length.
+
+It is impossible to convey in words the feeling of a man in such a
+situation as this. Apparently none of us actually realized the significance
+of what we were about to undertake. Probably it was because we were no
+longer in the trenches, and because we had been out and in the open all the
+night before.
+
+We stood there waiting. Overhead there was the continuous "Crack, crack,
+crack!" of enemy machine gun and other bullets. It was evident that we had
+already traversed a mile of our way, and that only half a mile lay ahead of
+us. The enemy bullets were flying high. I heard no command; I do not think
+any command was given in words, but of a sudden we heard a "Click!" to the
+left. No one even glanced in the direction. Every man fixed his bayonet.
+The man on the extreme left had fixed his, the "Click" had warned his
+comrades eight paces away, and the ominous sound, ominous for Hans and
+Fritz, "Click, click, click!" ran along the lines.
+
+The advance had started. In front were our officers, every one of them from
+junior to senior, well ahead of their men. A wave of the hand, a quarter
+right turn, one long blast of the whistle and we were off. We made mad
+rushes of fifty or sixty yards at a time, then down we would go. No place
+to seek cover, only to hug Mother Earth.
+
+Our lads were falling pretty fast; our officers even faster. To my left
+Slim Johnstone got his; ahead of me I saw Billy King go down. I heard some
+one yell out that Lieutenant Smith had dropped. In the next platoon
+Lieutenant Kirkpatrick fell dead. A gallant lad, this; he fell leading his
+men and with a word of cheer on his lips.
+
+We were about two hundred yards from the enemy's trench and my estimation
+is that easily one-third of our fighting men were gone. Easily eighty per
+cent. of our officers were out of the immediate game. Right in front of our
+eyes our captain--Captain Straight--fell. As he went down he blew two short
+blasts on his whistle, which was the signal to hug the earth once more.
+And we dropped.
+
+The officers and men who had been hit had begun their weary crawl back to
+the dressing station; that is, all of them who were able to make the
+effort. We saw that Captain Straight made no attempt to move. Some of us
+crept up to his side.
+
+"Hit in the upper leg," he whispered in reply to the queries.
+
+"Go back, sir, go back!" we urged, but Captain Straight was obdurate. He
+had made up his mind that he was going to see the thing through, and stick
+to it he would no matter what the cost to himself. He realized that only by
+some super-human effort would we now be able to take the enemy trench. The
+machine gun fire was hellish. The infantry fire was blinding. A bullet
+would flash through the sleeve of a tunic, rip off the brim of a cap, bang
+against a water-bottle, bury itself in the mass of a knapsack. It seemed as
+though no one could live in such a hail of lead. But no one had fallen down
+on the task of the day. Each battalion was advancing, with slowness and
+awful pain, but all were advancing.
+
+Captain Straight knew how we were placed for effectives, both in officers
+and men. He knew how we adored him. He lay a few minutes to get his breath,
+then attempted to stand, but could not, as one leg was completely out of
+commission. He dragged himself along with his hands, catching hold of the
+tufts of grass or digging his fingers into the soft earth. He made thirty
+or forty yards in this way, then one long blast of his whistle and we
+rushed ahead, to fall flat on a level with him as he sounded the two-blast
+command. Probably ten times he dragged himself forward, and ten times we
+rushed and dropped in that awful charge. The captain gritted his teeth, for
+his pain must have been horrible. He waved his arm as he lay and waited
+ahead of us--"Come on, lads--come on!" And we came.
+
+I don't know what other men may have felt in that last advance. For myself,
+the thought flashed across my mind--"What's the use? It is certain death to
+stay here longer; why not lie down, wait till the worst is over and be able
+to fight again--it is useless, hopeless--it is suicide to attempt such a
+task." Then just ahead of us I saw Captain Straight crawling slowly but
+surely, and through the "Zing!" of bullets I heard his voice, fainter but
+still earnest and full of courage, cry out: "Come on, lads--come on!"
+
+He was one of the first to roll over into that improvised German trench.
+
+No, we could not have failed; we could not have stopped. As one of our
+young boys said afterward: "Fellows, I'd have followed him to Hell and then
+some!"
+
+It was Hell all right, but no matter; we had gone through it, and got what
+we had come for--the German trench.
+
+Out of the seven hundred and fifty of us who advanced, a little over two
+hundred and fifty gained the German trench; and of that number twenty-five
+or more fell dead as soon as they reached the enemy, and got that revenge
+for which they had come.
+
+I doubt if there will again be a battle fought in this war where the
+feeling of the men will be as bitter as at St. Julien. Men were found dead
+with their bayonets through the body of some Hun, men who had been shot
+themselves thirty yards down the field of advance. Their bodies were dead,
+as we understand death, but the God-given spirit was alive, and that spirit
+carried the earthbound flesh forward to do its work, to avenge comrades
+murdered and womanhood outraged. It was marvelous--it may have been a
+miracle. It was done, and for all time has proved to the boys who fought
+out there the power of the spirit over the flesh.
+
+We had seen atrocities on the Belgians the day before. We had seen young
+girls who were mutilated and horribly maltreated. We had been gassed, we
+had seen our comrades die in an awful horror. We had had our sergeants
+crucified, and we were outnumbered ten to one. After all this, and after
+all the Hell through which we had passed from six that morning until after
+two, when we reached the enemy trench and presented the bright ends of our
+bayonets, Mr. Fritz went down on his knees and cried, "_Kamerad! Kamerad!_"
+
+What did we do? We did exactly what you would have done under like
+circumstances. "_Kamerad!_"--Bah!
+
+There is no doubt that the German soldier is a good soldier as far as he
+goes. He is good in a charge and if he had not done the despicable
+things--the dreadful outrages which he has done--he could be admired as a
+fighting machine. But there is one department where we of the Allies have
+him licked to a frazzle. Talk to any man who has been out there and he will
+say the same. The German soldier can not hold in a hand-to-hand fight. He
+can't face the cold steel. The second he glimpses the glint of a bayonet he
+is whimpering and asking for mercy.
+
+The German bayonet is a fiendish weapon. It is well its owner can not use
+it. For myself I do not know of one case where a comrade has been wounded
+by enemy steel. His bayonet is longer than ours, and from the tip for a few
+inches is a saw edge. This facilitates entrance into the body, but on
+turning to take it out it tears and rends savagely.
+
+It is impossible to describe the work of every battalion in a battle. In a
+charge, a concerted charge, such as we went through on April twenty-third,
+there was not one battalion that did better than another. There was not one
+officer who did better than another, there was not one man who outdistanced
+his fellow in valor. We all fought like the devil. It is only possible to
+convey the doings of the whole by telling the achievements of the few.
+
+Boys of the Fourth Western Ontario Battalion, commanded by Colonel Birchall
+of St. Catharines, who came through this business, have told me that their
+colonel lined them up and made a short speech to them. He took them into
+his confidence. He told them that the whole battalion should advance
+together; that he did not think it good policy to leave any part in
+reserve. He said: "I am going to lead you, boys; will you come?"
+
+There was a sonorous "Aye, aye, sir!" along the ranks.
+
+Colonel Birchall pulled his revolver from its holster, looked at it a
+moment and then threw it to the ground. Then he took his small riding
+switch and hung the loop over the first finger of his right hand.
+
+"Ready, boys!" he cried, and twirling the little cane round and round, he
+strode ahead.
+
+It was a terrible piece of work. On every side shells and bullets were
+falling. Men went down like ninepins at a fair. But always ahead was the
+colonel, always there was the short flash of his cane as it swished
+through the air. Then he was hit, a bullet in the upper right arm. He did
+not stop; he did not drop the cane.
+
+"On, boys, on!" And the men stumbled up and forward.
+
+Seven times Colonel Birchall was a mark for enemy fire. Seven times fresh
+wounds gushed forth with his life's blood. He was staggering a little now,
+but never a falter; on and on he went, the little cane feebly waving.
+
+Men say that at times the lines seemed to waver and almost to break; that
+the whole advancing force, small and scattered though it was, seemed to
+bend backward as cornstalks in wind, but always they saw the colonel ahead
+and recovered balance.
+
+Colonel Birchall fell dead on the parapet of the German trench, but he got
+what he had come after. His men were with him. There were seven hundred and
+more dead and wounded in the battalion, but the trench was theirs and Fritz
+was again begging for mercy.
+
+There are stories, wonderful stories of stirring things done by the several
+battalions, but it is not possible to give them in detail. Men made
+undying names in this battle, names which will go down through the ages as
+have the names of other British soldiers. There was Brigadier-General
+Turner, who is now Major-General, of the Third Brigade. There was
+Lieutenant-Colonel, now Brigadier-General, Watson of the Second Battalion,
+who, together with Lieutenant-Colonel Rennie, now Brigadier-General, of the
+Third Battalion, reinforced the Third Infantry Brigade. These two were of
+the First Brigade. Then there came the Seventh Battalion, which is the
+British Columbia Regiment of the Second Brigade, and the Tenth Battalion,
+also of the Second.
+
+Lieutenant-Colonel Boyle commanded the Fighting Tenth, and gave his life in
+the advance. The Sixteenth Battalion Canadian Scottish were under command
+of Lieutenant-Colonel Leckie, who has since become Brigadier-General. The
+Tenth had many losses. Major MacLaren, second in command, died in hospital
+shortly after being taken there, and Major Ormond was wounded. Major
+Guthrie is another man who carried the Tenth forward to more triumphs.
+Brigadier-General Mercer, Lieutenant-Colonel Morrison, Captain T.E. Powers
+are others, and Lieutenant-Colonel, since Brigadier-General, Lipsett,
+commanded the Ninetieth Winnipeg Rifles, whose men suffered severely from
+gas.
+
+Major Norsworthy was killed while trying to bring up reinforcements. He
+endeavored to reach Major McCuiag, who had the great misfortune, after
+doing marvelous work and saving an almost desperate situation, to be taken
+prisoner by the enemy. Men of the Seventh Battalion were Colonel
+Hart-McHarg, Major Odlum and Lieutenant Mathewson. The Second Brigade was
+under command of Brigadier-General Currie, who now is the
+Commander-in-Chief of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces.
+
+Lieutenant-Colonel, now Brigadier-General, Armstrong, commanded the
+Engineers, but crowning all of these names is that of our beloved
+Commander-in-Chief at the time, General Alderson.
+
+Ten thousand names more could be added to this gallant roll of honor. At
+the beginning of the battle of Ypres our lines were a little over twelve
+thousand strong, and after six days and nights of fighting there remained
+two thousand of us standing. We had practically not budged an inch. The
+Germans had not broken our line, our one thin, straggling, far-stretched
+line. We remained the victors of Ypres.
+
+Perhaps our greatest reward came when on April twenty-sixth the English
+troops reached us. We had been completely cut off by the enemy barrage from
+all communication with other sectors of the line. Still, through the
+wounded gone back, word of our stand had drifted out. The English boys
+fought and force-marched and fought again their terrible way through the
+barrage to our aid. And when they arrived, weary and worn and torn, cutting
+their bloody way to us, they cheered themselves hoarse; cheered as they
+marched along, cheered and gripped our hands as they got within touch with
+us. Yell after yell went upward, and stirring words woke the echoes. The
+boys of the Old Country paid their greatest tribute to us of the New as
+they cried:
+
+"Canadians--Canadians--that's all!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+TEARS AND NO CHEERS
+
+
+On May third we commenced our withdrawal to Bailleul, leaving our sector of
+the line in safe hands. We were billeted in this town for a rest.
+
+We were a haggard bunch. Our faces were drawn in lines like old men, many
+were gray, some were white; our eyes were wild and glassy and we moved
+jerkily or started at the slightest of sharp sounds.
+
+Reinforcements began to arrive. We needed them. There were C and D
+Companies without an officer between them. Major Kirkpatrick was wounded
+and a prisoner; Captain Straight wounded and taken; Captain Johnson wounded
+and imprisoned; Lieutenant Jarvis, son of Amelius Jarvis, the famous
+sporting figure of Toronto, lay dead, and our gallant old Major Pete
+Anderson, our sniping officer, was also captured, though he has now
+escaped from enemy hands.
+
+In billets we had thought we were hard hit. We had not realized it to the
+full till the morning we were lined up, one brigade at a time, for review.
+We had had an issue of fresh clothing, we had had some long hours of sleep,
+we had had all that soap and water could do for us, but we were a sorry and
+sorrowful lot of men. We had the light of triumph in our eyes, but even
+that was dimmed at thought of the boys who were gone to the great review
+above.
+
+Our beloved commander-in-chief came along the lines to review us. He looked
+at us with the brave eyes of a father sorrowing over a dead son. He walked
+with head high and step firm, but his voice shook with deep emotion, and he
+did not hide the tears which rose to his eyes as he spoke his famous words
+of commendation.
+
+They are immortal words, words which express the regret of a true man for
+comrades whose sacrifice was supreme, words which express pride in deeds
+done and breathe of a determination to greater deeds, if possible, in a
+triumphant future.
+
+  Words Spoken to the First Canadian Division
+  (Brigade by Brigade and to Engineers and Artillery)
+      After the Twelve Days and Nights of Fighting
+               April 22d to May 4th, 1915
+                          By
+            Lieutenant-General E.A.H. Alderson
+            Commanding First Canadian Division
+
+    "All units, all ranks of the First Canadian Division, I tell you
+    truly, that my heart is so full I hardly know how to speak to you.
+    It is full of two feelings, the first being sorrow for the loss of
+    those comrades of ours who have gone, the second--pride in what
+    the First Canadian Division has done.
+
+    "As regards our comrades who have lost their lives, and we will
+    speak of them with our caps off [here the general took off his
+    cap, and all did likewise], my faith in the Almighty is such that
+    I am perfectly sure that, in fact, to die for their friends, no
+    matter what their past lives have been, no matter what they have
+    done that they ought not to have done (as all of us do), I repeat
+    that I am perfectly sure the Almighty takes care of them and looks
+    after them at once. Lads--we can not leave them better than like
+    that. [Here the general put his cap on, and all did the same.]
+
+    "Now, I feel that we may, without any false pride, think a little
+    of what the Division has done during the past few days. I would
+    first of all tell you that I have never been so proud of anything
+    in my life as I am of this armlet '1 Canada' on it that I wear on
+    my right arm. I thank you and congratulate you from the bottom of
+    my heart for the part each one of you has taken in giving me this
+    feeling of pride.
+
+    "I think it is possible that you do not, all of you, quite realize
+    that if we had retired on the evening of the twenty-second of
+    April when our Allies fell back from the gas and left our flank
+    quite open, the whole of the Seventeenth and Twenty-eighth
+    Divisions would probably have been cut off, certainly they would
+    not have got away a gun or a vehicle of any sort, and probably not
+    more than half the infantry. This is what our commander-in-chief
+    meant when he telegraphed as he did: 'The Canadians undoubtedly
+    saved the situation.' My lads, if ever men had a right to be proud
+    in this world, you have.
+
+    "I know my military history pretty well, and I can not think of an
+    instance, especially when the cleverness and determination of the
+    enemy is taken into account, in which troops were placed in such a
+    difficult position; nor can I think of an instance in which so
+    much depended on the standing fast of one division.
+
+    "You will remember the last time I spoke to you, just before you
+    went into the trenches at Sailly, now over two months ago, I told
+    you about my old regiment--the Royal West Kents--having gained a
+    reputation for not budging from the trenches, no matter how they
+    were attacked. I said then that I was quite sure that in a short
+    time the army out here would be saying the same of you. I little
+    thought--we, none of us thought--how soon those words would come
+    true. But now, to-day, not only the army out here, but all Canada,
+    all England, and all the Empire, is saying it of you.
+
+    "The share each unit has taken in earning this reputation is no
+    small one.
+
+    "I have three pages of congratulatory telegrams from His Majesty
+    the King downward which I will read to you, with also a very nice
+    letter from our army commander, Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien.
+
+    "Now, I doubt if any divisional commander, or any division ever
+    had so many congratulatory telegrams and messages as these, and
+    remember they are not merely polite and sentimental ones; they
+    express just what the senders feel.
+
+    "There is one word I would say to you before I stop. You have made
+    a reputation second to none gained in this war, but remember, no
+    man can live on his reputation, he must keep on adding to it. That
+    you will do so I feel just as sure as I did two months ago when I
+    told you that I knew you would make a reputation when the
+    opportunity came.
+
+    "I am now going to shake hands with your officers, and I do so
+    wanting you to feel that I am shaking hands with each one of you,
+    as I would actually do if the time permitted.
+
+    "No--we will not have any cheering now--we will keep that until
+    you have added to your reputation, as I know you will."
+
+And there was no cheering. We turned away--the few men of us left whole in
+those scattered ranks--our eyes tear-dimmed in memory of those comrades
+whose lives had gone out; but our hearts ready to answer the call wherever
+it might lead us.
+
+The world to-day knows what the Canadian boys have done. We have more than
+added to our reputation.
+
+Right after this terrible scrap at Ypres came Givenchy and Festubert, and
+then we held the line at Ploegsteert for a whole year, fighting fiercely at
+St. Eloi, and stopping them again at Sanctuary Wood.
+
+In the summer of 1916 fourteen thousand of us went down before German
+cannon, but still they did not break our lines. This was known as the third
+battle of Ypres.
+
+From Ypres we went to the Somme, and it was on the Somme that we met our
+Australian cousins who jokingly greeted us with the statement "We're here
+to finish what you started," and we fired back, "Too bad you hadn't
+finished what you started down in Gallipoli!"
+
+It was not very long before both were engaged in that terrible battle of
+the Somme, where to Canadian arms fell the honor of taking the village of
+Courcellette. We plugged right on and soon we put the "Vim" into Vimy, and
+took Vimy Ridge. As I write we are marking time in front of Lens.
+
+At Ypres we started our great casualty lists with ten thousand. To-day over
+one hundred twenty-five thousand Canadian boys have fallen, and there are
+over eighteen thousand who will never come back to tell their story.
+
+If the generals of the British Army were proud of us in 1915, I wonder how
+they feel to-day?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+"THE BEST O' LUCK--AND GIVE 'EM HELL!"
+
+
+Imagine a bright crisp morning in late September. The sun rises high and
+the beams strike with comforting warmth even into the fire-trench where we
+gather in groups to catch its every glint.
+
+We feel good on such a morning. We clean up a bit, for things are
+quiet--that is, fairly quiet. Only a few shells are flying, there is little
+or no rifle fire and nobody is getting killed, nobody is even getting
+plugged.
+
+The whole long day passes quietly. We are almost content with our lot. We
+laugh a good deal, we joke, we play the eternal penny ante, and possibly
+the letters come.
+
+Just before stand-to at sundown the quiet will be broken. The artillery
+behind our lines will open up with great activity. We notice that the big
+shells only are being used and we notice that they are concentrating
+entirely on the German front line, immediately ahead and to the right and
+left of where we have our position. We are more than a little interested.
+There is decidedly something in the wind. We wait, but nothing happens. We
+have stand-to and get our reliefs for guard.
+
+Every man has his bayonet fixed for the night. We give it a little extra
+polish. It may be needed soon. There is no outward show of nervousness. No
+man speaks to his neighbor of his immediate thoughts. We begin to smoke a
+little more rapidly, perhaps. We might have had a cigarette an hour during
+the heavy shelling of the day. During the night we will increase to one
+every half-hour, every twenty minutes. We light a fag, take a few puffs and
+throw it away. That is the only evidence of nerves.
+
+We are in a state of complete ignorance as to what the outcome of this
+shelling may be. We have seen it just as severe before and nothing but a
+skirmish result. Some of us have seen shelling of the same intensity and
+have gone over the top and into a terrible mélange. We are always kept in
+ignorance; no commands and no orders are given. Did we know for hours
+ahead that at such and such a time we would go over the top, our nerves
+could hardly stand the strain. The noise, the terrific noise of our
+artillery bombarding the German trenches is hard enough on our nerves; what
+it must be on the nerves of the enemy is beyond conception. We do not
+wonder that in these latter days they fall on their knees and yell
+"_Kamerad_!"
+
+As a rule a charge takes place just before dawn, when the gray cold light
+of morning is struggling up from the East. All night we are occupied
+according to our individual temperaments. Some are able to sleep even in
+such a racket. The great majority of us are writing letters. There are
+always a few last things to be said to the home-folks, a few small
+possessions we want to will in special ways. We hand our letters to an
+officer or to some special chum. If this is to be our last time over--if it
+is to be our last charge--the officer or chum will see to it, if he lives,
+or the stretcher-bearers or the chaplains, if he doesn't, that the small
+treasures go back home to the old folks.
+
+Just before dawn there is a difference in the character of the shelling.
+The heavy shells are falling farther back on German reserves and lighter
+artillery is being used on the enemy front line. The position lies some
+three hundred yards from the enemy front.
+
+The light shells sweep close overhead as they go by our trench. We have to
+hug the sides close; sometimes the vacuum is so great that it will carry
+off a cap; if we are not careful it may suck up a head or lift us
+completely off our feet.
+
+This curtain of fire continues for hours; it varies in direction now and
+then, but never in intensity. There is a controlling force over this
+tremendous bombardment. To my mind the most important man on the
+battle-field is he who holds the ordering of the bombardment--the
+observation officer. He must know everything, see everything, but must
+never be seen. During a heavy bombardment he works in conjunction with
+another observation officer. They are hidden away in any old place; it may
+be a ruined chimney, it may be a tree which is still left standing, or it
+may be in some hastily built up haystack. He controls the entire artillery
+in action on his special front, and he holds the lives of thousands of men
+in the hollow of his hand. One tiniest miscalculation and hundreds of us
+pay the price.
+
+He is cool, imperturbable, calculating, ready in any emergency,
+good-tempered, deliberate and yet with the power to act instantly. At times
+he has command over a magnificent number of invectives!
+
+As the minutes pass and the day lightens we smoke a fag every five minutes,
+every three minutes. The trench is filled with the blue gray smoke of
+thousands of cigarettes, lighted, puffed once, thrown away. It soothes our
+nerves. It gives us something to do with our hands. It takes our mind off
+the impending clash.
+
+If we make an attack in broad daylight, which is seldom done except under a
+special emergency, the only command to charge will be the click, click,
+click of bayonets going into place all along the line. But charges are
+mostly made at gray-dawn, when bayonets are already fixed. Suddenly, away
+down the line we catch sight of one of our men climbing over the parapet.
+Then trench ladders are fixed, and in a twinkling every man of us is over
+the top with: "The best o' luck--and give 'em hell!"
+
+We crawl out over the open. We reach our own barbed wire entanglements. We
+creep through them, round them, and out to No Man's Land. We are in it now
+for good and all.
+
+The enemy is now concentrating his fire on our reserves. He knows that we
+have not had sufficient men in the front line trench to be of great effect.
+He knows that we can not fit them in there. He knows that the moment we
+have cleared the top of the parapet hundreds of men have poured from the
+communication trenches into our places. He knows that for miles back men
+are massed as thick as they can stand in the reserve trenches. His object
+is to destroy our reserves and not the immediate trench in front of him.
+
+We follow the same plan. For, as we advance in short sharp rushes, the
+observation officer, who never for a moment relaxes his hold on the
+situation, flashes back by telegraph or field telephone the command to the
+artillery lying miles away to raise their curtain of fire. They do so, and
+shells fall on the German reserves, while we press forward, teeth bared and
+cold steel gleaming grayly, to take the front lines. We leap the parapet of
+the German trench. We spot our man and bear down on him. We clean out the
+dugouts and haul away the cowering officers, and already we are
+straightening and strengthening the German trench.
+
+Behind us come wave on wave of our reserves. The second will take the
+second trench of the enemy; the third, the third, and so on. Then we
+consolidate our position, and Fritz is a sad and sorry boy.
+
+That is the way it should work, but in the early days of the war we used to
+find this very difficult. We of the front line would charge and take our
+trench. We would get there and not a German to be seen! He would be beating
+it down his communication trenches, or what was left of them, as hard as he
+could go. We were supposed to stay in the front trench of the enemy. Well,
+it was simply against human nature, against the human nature of the First
+Canadian boys at any rate. We may have been out there for months and not
+had a chance to see a German. And had been wishing and waiting for this
+very opportunity. We would see Fritz disappear round a traverse and we
+simply could not stand still and let him go, or let the other fellow get
+him. We were bound to go after him. This was really our traditional
+weakness. Often-times we went too far in our eagerness to capture the Hun,
+and were unable to hold all that we got.
+
+In the early days, too, we charged in open formation. Certainly we lost, in
+the first instance, fewer men by that method, but when we reached the enemy
+trench, took it, and had established ourselves therein, we were rarely
+strong enough in numbers to repulse the almost certain counter-attacks that
+came a few minutes or even an hour or so later.
+
+We have altered this method now. We attack, not in the close formation,
+shoulder to shoulder, of the German, but in a formation which is a
+variation of his. We attack in groups of twenty or thirty men, who are
+placed shoulder to shoulder. If a shell comes over one group, it is
+obliterated, to be sure, but suppose no shell comes; then several such
+groups will reach the enemy lines, and Hans has not got the ghost of a
+chance once we get to close quarters. He has not the glimmer of a chance in
+a counter-attack when we have sufficient men to hold on to what we have
+gained.
+
+On the other hand a German charge on our lines is a pretty sight. They
+advance at a dog-trot. They come shoulder to shoulder, each man almost
+touching his neighbor. They are in perfect alignment to start, and they
+lift their feet practically in exact time one with the other. Unlike us,
+they shoot as they advance. We have a cartridge in our magazine, but we
+have the safety catch on. We dare not shoot as we advance because our
+officers are always ahead, always cheering the boys forward. The German
+officer is always behind. He drives his men.
+
+They shoot from the hip, but in that way their fire is never very
+effective. As they advance it is practically impossible to miss them, no
+matter how bad a shot any of us might be. We get fifteen rounds per minute
+from our rifles and our orders are to shoot low and to full capacity.
+
+In the attacks of the enemy which I have seen they certainly have been
+brave. One must give them their due. It takes courage to advance in face of
+rifle fire, machine gun fire and artillery shells, in this close formation.
+Wave after wave of them come across in their field gray-blue uniforms and
+they never cower. One wave will be mowed down and another will quicken the
+pace a trifle and take its place. One man will go down and another will
+step into the gap. They are like a vast animated machine.
+
+In one attack which we repulsed I am conservative when I say that they were
+lying dead and wounded three and four deep and yet they attacked again and
+again without faltering, only to be driven back to defeat in the end.
+
+This war is not over yet by a long shot, and I should like to offer some
+advice to the boys who are going over from this continent. Our officers
+know better than we. The generals and aides who have been working on the
+problem, on the strategy and tactics during the three years gone by, are
+more qualified to conduct the war than the private who has lately joined.
+If you are told to stay in a certain place, then stay there. If you are
+told to dig in, you are a bad soldier if you don't dig and dig quickly. You
+are only a nuisance as long as you question authority. It does not pay. The
+boys of the First Division learned by experience. Do as you're told. The
+heads are taking no undue risks. Your life is as valuable to them as it is
+to you. They won't let you lose it unnecessarily. Get ahead and obey.
+
+There is no need to lose your individuality. The vast difference between us
+and the enemy soldier is that we can think for ourselves should occasion
+arise; we can act on our own responsibility or we can lead if the need be.
+
+Remember, that every single man is of importance. Each one is a cog in the
+vast organization and one slip may disrupt the whole arrangement. Obey, but
+use your intelligence in your obedience. Don't act blindly. Consider the
+circumstances and as far as you can use your reason as you believe the
+general or the colonel has used his. You are bounded only by your own small
+sector. What you know of other salients is hearsay. The general knows the
+situation in its entirety.
+
+Obedience, a cool head, a clean rifle and a sharp bayonet will carry you
+far.
+
+[Illustration: ©_Famous Players--Lasky Corporation. Scene from the
+Photo-Play_
+
+SHERMAN WAS NOT ALWAYS RIGHT.]
+
+[Illustration: Behind the barrage]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+OUT OF IT
+
+
+Every man who goes into the active service of the present war knows that
+someday, somehow, somewhere, he is going to get plugged. We have
+expressions of our own as to wounds. If a chap loses a leg or an arm or
+both, he'll say, "I lost mine," but when there is a wound, no matter how
+serious, yet which does not entail the loss of a visible part of the body,
+we say, "I got mine."
+
+So it was as time wore on, I "got mine" in the right shoulder and right
+lung. A German explosive bullet caught me while I was in a lying position.
+It was at Ypres; we all get it at Ypres.
+
+The thing happened under peculiar circumstances. It was the second time in
+my army career that I volunteered for anything. The first time was the
+night I went on listening post; the second time I got plugged, and plugged
+for good.
+
+We had repulsed the enemy several times. We were running short of
+ammunition and our position was enfiladed. It was absolutely necessary, if
+all of us were not to lose our lives, that some one should bring up
+ammunition.
+
+The ammunition dump lay about a mile back of our line. An officer called
+for volunteers to creep back for a supply. It was broad daylight, but
+twenty-eight other lads and myself stepped forward willing to attempt the
+task.
+
+The men who remained behind had a command to keep up a rapid fire over the
+enemy trenches which would lend us some cover. No matter how perfect this
+covering may be, it is never completely effective in silencing the enemy
+fire. Quite a number of bullets scattered about us as we clambered along
+the short communication trench, and up into the open. This was my first
+experience in running away from bullets, and I proved in the first five
+seconds of that journey that a man, no matter what his propensities for
+winning medals may be, can run much faster from bullets than he can toward
+them.
+
+Among us were boys of several other companies, and on the way out three of
+the twenty-nine got hit. I did not know whom. We kept on, breathless and
+gasping, running as we were under the weight of full equipment and dodging
+bullets as we went. Shells were falling round us too, now. We were not
+happy.
+
+At last we got to our destination and picked up the boxes. A box of
+ammunition weighs a hundred or more pounds, so we decided that three of us
+should carry two boxes. The boxes are fitted with handles on each end.
+
+We started off running at top speed, then dropping flat on our stomachs to
+fetch our breath and rest our aching arms. The enemy was rapidly getting
+thicker. We rose and rushed forward another stretch. At three hundred yards
+from the trench, the greater number of our crowd had fallen. We dropped.
+Then our hearts stood still, for from our trench there came a silence we
+could feel.
+
+We knew what it meant. There was no need for the enemy to increase the
+rapidity of his fire over us and over the boys in the trench to let us know
+what was up. Our ammunition had already given out, and we had to face the
+last few hundred yards without protection, meager though it had been
+throughout. We knew there was not a man in that trench who had a bullet
+left. We knew that as far as we were concerned, we were done. We
+metaphorically shook hands with ourselves and wished friend self a long
+good-by. We looked at the sun and said "Tra-la-la" to it, and we wondered
+in a flash of thought what the old world would be like without us. We
+wondered where we would "light up."
+
+All this passed in a moment of time, and then we decided that it would be
+better if we paired up, two men taking one box of ammunition. This offered
+a smaller target for the busy enemy, and also made for increased speed in
+covering the remaining ground.
+
+We sprang up once more and dodged and doubled as we leaped through the rain
+of bullets, machine gun and rifle. How we lived I don't know. I was sharing
+a box with a lad whom I heard the fellows call Bob. He was no more than a
+boy, but we were much of a size and ran light. We were the only two of the
+twenty-nine left on our feet. To-day I am one of five of that bunch left
+alive.
+
+About fifty yards from the trench we dropped for a last rest before the
+final spurt which would decide the whole course of events in the next ten
+minutes. Would we reach that trench and turn in our box of ammunition, or
+would we "get ours" and would the boys so eagerly waiting for us be
+surrounded and captured? Or would many of them do what they had threatened?
+"If it comes to surrendering," several had said in my hearing, "I will run
+a bayonet into myself rather than be taken."
+
+When a man is lying close to the ground there is not so very great a chance
+of his being hit by bullets. They pass overhead as a rule. It is when a man
+is kneeling or standing, or between the two positions that the great danger
+lies. The lad Bob and I were just in the act of rising when mine came
+along. I felt no more than a stinging blow in the right shoulder, a searing
+cut and a thud of pain as the bullet exploded in leaving my body. I fell on
+my face and blood gushed from my shoulder.
+
+"Hit hard or soft?" queried my companion, as he threw himself down beside
+me.
+
+"Don't know," I gasped.
+
+"You're hit in the mouth," he said, as the blood poured from between my
+lips.
+
+"No, by gum, you're hit in the back!"
+
+I gasped, nearly choked, and spluttered out: "You're a liar; I'm not hit in
+the back." But there was a gash in the back where the exploding missile had
+torn away and carried out portions of my lung and bits of bone and flesh.
+
+I closed my eyes. Then from a distance I heard Bob speak.
+
+"I'm going to fix you," he said, and knelt beside me. He got into such a
+position that his own body shielded me from any of the enemy bullets. It
+was a marvelous piece of bravery; less has earned a Victoria Cross.
+
+He turned me round so that my head was toward our reserves and my feet were
+toward the Germans. In almost all cases when a man is hit he falls forward
+with his face to the enemy. In all probability he will become unconscious.
+When he awakes he remembers that he fell forward. A blind instinct works
+within him and makes him strive to turn around. He knows danger lies ahead,
+but friend and safety are back of him.
+
+Bob shifted me round. "Remember," he whispered, "that if you should faint,
+when you come to you are placed right. You are in the right
+direction--don't turn round."
+
+A wonderful motto for a man to carry through life. Bob had no thought of
+future or fame. In keen solicitude for a fallen comrade he uttered words
+which mean more in these days of war and blood than do the words of poets.
+
+"You're in the right direction--don't turn round!"
+
+Then the lad got up to go on. He struggled to lift the box of ammunition.
+
+I whispered to him hoarsely: "You're not going on--you will never get
+there. It is certain death."
+
+"Good-by, old boy," was his answer. "You don't think because the rest of
+you have gone down that I am going to be a piker. Say 'Hello!' to Mother
+for me should you see her before I do."
+
+I have never seen his mother. I do not know her. If she lives she has the
+memory of a son who, though a boy in years, was a soldier and a very
+gallant gentleman. Bob tried to reach the trench, but a rain of bullets got
+him and he fell dead only a little way from me.
+
+I lay where I had fallen for some time. I don't know how long, but long
+enough to see our boys captured by the enemy. And in so dreadful a plight
+as I was I had to smile. Those men who had boasted they would kill
+themselves, surrendered with the rest. Life is very sweet. There is always
+a chance of living, and always a chance of escape no matter how brutal the
+system in German prison camps.
+
+Every man in that trench surrendered honorably. Not a man had a bullet
+left. They were hopelessly outnumbered, and it is hard to die when there is
+youth and love and strength.
+
+As evening wore on I feared that I too might be captured, and I commenced a
+weary struggle to crawl back across the field. It was while I was resting
+after such an effort that a wonderful moment came to me. I saw the Lord
+Jesus upon His cross, and the compassion upon His face was marvelous to
+see. He appeared to speak to me.
+
+"I am dying," I muttered, and then thought, "Shall I pray?"
+
+Of outward praying I had done none. I thought about it and wondered. To
+pray now--no, that was being a piker. I had not prayed openly before, now
+when I was nearing death it was no time for a hurried repentance and a
+stammered prayer. I watched the vision as it slowly faded, and a great
+comfort surrounded me. I was happy.
+
+I crawled on and reached a shell hole. It must have been an hour later that
+a despatch rider came to me. His motorcycle had been shot from under him,
+and he was striving to reach his destination on foot. He spoke to me, and
+then placed me in a blanket, which he took from a dead soldier. In this he
+dragged me to the shelter of an old tumbledown house. It had been riddled
+with shot and shell, but the greater part of the outer walls were standing,
+and it was shelter.
+
+I begged the despatch rider to give me his name. I begged him to take some
+small things of mine to keep as a token for what he had done for me. But he
+would have nothing. He hurried away with the intention of sending help to
+me, and as he went I begged his name once more. "Oh! Johnnie Canuck!" said
+he. And there it remains. I do not know the name of the man who dragged me
+to comparative safety at such terrible risk to himself.
+
+Behind the old house where I lay there was a battery of British guns,
+4.7's. After a while the enemy found the range, and their shells commenced
+bursting round me. God in Heaven! I died a hundred deaths in that old ruin.
+Once a shell hit what roof there was and a score of bricks came crashing
+about me. Not one touched. I seemed charmed. I could hear the shells
+screeching through the air a second before they burst near where I lay. Of
+bodily pain I had little. The discomfort was great; the thirst was
+appalling. I thought I should bleed to death before help reached me.
+But there was nothing to compare with the mental strain of
+waiting--waiting--waiting for a shell to burst. Where would it drop? Would
+the next get me?
+
+I hoped and longed and waited, but help did not come. I never lost
+consciousness. Darkness came and dawn. Another day went by and the shelling
+went on as before. Another night, another dawn and then two Highland
+stretcher-bearers came in. They raised me gently. The bleeding had stopped,
+but that journey on the stretcher was too much. I had been found and I let
+myself drift into the land of unknown things.
+
+I woke before we reached a dugout dressing station. Here I was given a
+first-aid dressing and immediately after carried away to an old-fashioned
+village behind the lines. At this point there was a rough field hospital,
+an old barn probably. There were eighty or ninety wounded there when I
+arrived. Among the many French and British were some Germans. The very next
+stretcher to me was occupied by one of the enemy.
+
+The Red Cross floated over the building, but that emblem of mercy made no
+difference to the Hun. The shells commenced to find range, and in a short
+time the roof was lifted off. A wounded man died close to me. I can only
+remember the purr of a motor as an ambulance rushed up. Then I saw four
+stretcher-bearers; two grabbed the German, and two caught hold of me. We
+were rushed to the ambulance and driven at maddening speed through the
+shell-ridden town.
+
+Though I was barely conscious, though I believed that I was nearing my last
+moments, I remember how it struck me vividly,--the contrast in the methods
+of fighting. German shells were blasting to pieces the shelter of wounded
+men and nurses. German wounded were being cared for by those whom their
+comrades sought to kill. The Hun might have killed his own. It did not
+matter. What is a life here or there to a Hohenzollern? And the
+Allies--here were two British stretcher-bearers bent under the burden of an
+enemy patient. They were striving to save his life from the fire of his own
+people.
+
+I do not remember any more after I was put in the ambulance. I came to
+myself in a base hospital in France. I was strapped to a water bed.
+Everything round me was soft and fresh and clean, and smelled deliciously.
+There was a patient, sweet-smiling woman in nurse's costume who came and
+went to the beck and call of every man of us. We were whimpering and
+peevish; we were wracked with pain and weary of mind, but that nurse never
+failed to smile. Call a hundred times, call her once, she was always there
+to soothe, to help, to sympathize, and always smiling. Her heart must have
+been breaking at times, but her serene face never showed her sorrow or her
+weariness.
+
+Often and often I am asked, "Why didn't you die when you were lying out
+there on the battle-field?" Why didn't I die? I could have, several times,
+but I didn't want to die, and I knew that if I were found I need not die.
+We raw soldiers when we go to France are interested in the possibilities of
+being wounded. We know we've more or less got it coming to us, and we begin
+quietly to make inquiries. We notice all those men who wear the gold
+honor-bars on their sleeves. Yes; for every wound we get we have the right
+to wear a narrow strip of gold braid on the tunic sleeve.
+
+We talk to the man with the honor-bar. We ask him how he was treated in the
+hospital. He may be doing the dirtiest fatigue duty round trench or camp,
+he may be smoking or writing a letter, but the minute be hears the word
+"hospital" he drops everything. If he be a Cockney soldier he will repeat
+the word: "'Orspital, mate--lor' luv ye, wish I wuz back!"
+
+That is the feeling. Talk to a thousand men after this war; ask them their
+experiences and they will tell you a thousand different stories. Ask them
+how they were treated in the hospital and there is but one reply: "Treated
+in hospital? Excellent!"
+
+There is only one word. The great Red Cross--Royal Army Medical Corps--is
+practically one hundred per cent. efficient. The veterans will tell the
+youngsters, "If you're wounded and have to lie out--then, lie out--don't be
+foolish enough to die while you are lying out--because you can't die once
+they find you."
+
+YOU CAN'T DIE.
+
+We remember that. We remember facts, too, that we hear from time to time.
+We remember that out of all the casualties on the western front, only two
+and a half per cent. have died of wounds. We remember that we have a
+ninety-seven and a half fighting chance out of a hundred, and we are
+willing to take it. Some of us have read of other wars and we know, for
+instance, that in the American Civil War, from the best available
+statistics, over twenty-two per cent. died of wounds--and the reason? No
+efficient medical corps--no Red Cross--no neutral flag of red on white.
+
+I was taken over to London as soon as I could be moved. I was in the Royal
+Herbert Hospital at Woolwich. It is not possible to describe in detail the
+treatment. The doctors were untiring. Hour after hour and day after day
+they worked without ceasing. The nurses were unremitting. No eight-hour day
+for them!
+
+And here again I saw the treatment of the German wounded. They were in
+wards as gay with flowers, as cool, as clean, as delightful as ours. They
+had German newspapers to read, and certain days of the week brought a
+German band, drawn from among fit prisoners, to play German airs for the
+benefit of the sick prisoners. We think of this, and then we meet a British
+or French soldier who has been exchanged or who has escaped from a German
+hospital prison! It is hard to think of it calmly. The first impulse is to
+follow the law, "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." But that is
+not the way to-day of the square fighter.
+
+At this hospital I was operated on and it was shown that it was an
+explosive bullet that hit me. Several pieces were taken out of me, and
+these I keep as grim souvenirs. Several other pieces are still in my body,
+and not infrequently by certain twinges I am made aware of their presence.
+
+I have never seen an explosive bullet, and few of the Allied soldiers
+believe that many of us have felt them. Should one of the Allies be found
+making an explosive or Dum-Dum bullet, he is liable to be court-martialed
+and shot. There are those of us who would like to use them, but it is not
+what we like, it is what we may or may not do. It is discipline, and
+discipline forbids a brutal warfare. Thank God that we are fighting this
+war on the square, that our leaders are _making_ us fight it on the square.
+Thank God that no attempt has ever been made to brutalize the troops of the
+Allies.
+
+Part of the four months I was incapacitated was spent at Dobson Volunteer
+Red Cross Hospital, and here I was again struck with the marvelous devotion
+of the women. Day after day many of the leading women would come in,
+duchesses and others of title, and seek for Canadian lads to whom they
+could show kindnesses. Luxurious cars waited to drive us out for the air;
+flowers, fruits and books reached us, and quantities of cigarettes.
+
+When the boys of the U.S.A. reach British hospitals in England, as no doubt
+they shall, they will find the same enthusiasm, the same attention bestowed
+upon them from the first ladies of the land and from the humblest who may
+only be able to give a smile, a cheery word or maybe a bunch of fragrant
+violets.
+
+Two weeks before I was wounded I was recommended for a commission by my
+former colonel, Maynard Rogers, and the official document came to me while
+I was in the English hospital suffering from my wounds. It was a great
+source of pride and satisfaction that my commission, which I prize so
+highly to-day, was signed by the late Sir Charles Tupper, father of the
+Canadian Confederation and one of the Dominion's greatest statesmen.
+
+But my fighting days are over. I am "out of it," but out with memories of
+good fellowship, real comrades, kindness, sympathy and friendships that dim
+the recollection of death, of destruction, of blood, of outrage, of murder
+and brutality.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+GERMAN TERMINOLOGICAL INEXACTITUDES
+
+
+Some years ago a British statesman, then great, put on record a phrase
+which at once is polite and convincing. He wished to convey that a certain
+statement was a d---- lie, but as he himself had made the statement he was
+in somewhat of an awkward situation. He got out of the difficulty by
+calling it a "terminological inexactitude."
+
+Now since I have been back in America, and more especially in the States, I
+have run to earth any number of terminological inexactitudes uttered by
+German propagandists. As far as Canada is concerned, the work is not now
+progressing very favorably. The German inexactitude farmer is sowing seed
+on barren soil. But I have traveled extensively during some crowded weeks
+through the States, and I find that among a certain section of the American
+public the seed of the German propagandist has taken root; not so deeply,
+however, but that an application of the hoe of truth will remove it. It is
+there all the same, and his success is spurring the agents to further
+efforts.
+
+The German in high place is aware that the English are and always have been
+very friendly to the American people. He knows that the Englishman has
+regarded the American as of the same family. He also knows that one day,
+and possibly very soon, there will be a union that will amount almost to an
+amalgamation of the three greatest races on earth, closely bound now by
+ties of blood and friendship, that will never be broken: France, America,
+England. He knows that when that occurs the German day is done, that the
+sun has set forever on a German Empire.
+
+The German in high place has realized this, and with the usual thoroughness
+of the race has set out to combat this friendship and prevent this joining.
+He is trying to do it by the regulation German method. He knows the British
+dislike of boasting, and that the American and the Britisher are woefully
+trusting. They themselves abhor deception and they distrust no man until
+they find him out. The British and the French have discovered the
+machinations of the German. The people of the United States have yet to be
+convinced that they have been deliberately deceived, cozened and duped by
+the Kaiser's government.
+
+I am embarrassed at times as I go from town to town by the intensity of the
+congratulations poured on me as a representative of our Canadian Army.
+
+"You Canadians have done it all. We know that. We know that the English are
+hanging back and have done nothing."
+
+I am ashamed when people talk to me in such a strain. I am ashamed of their
+lack of intelligence, ashamed that they will allow themselves to be so
+deceived.
+
+"You Canadians were asked by England to go and help her. When you got there
+they put you in front and stayed in safety themselves."
+
+Think of it! Think of the base lie. Think of believing such twaddle. At
+first I did not trouble to deny the statement; then, as it was repeated
+again and again, I began to deny it.
+
+The British Empire is in this fight. Canada is doing her share of it, and
+nothing more than her share. We were not asked to send men over. We
+declared war upon Germany ourselves, because we are an independent
+dominion. We have had on the battle-field at one time some one hundred and
+ten thousand men--that is the greatest number at any one time, though of
+course nearly five hundred thousand are in khaki. At Vimy Ridge we held the
+longest portion of trenches that we have ever held before or since--five
+miles. To right and left of us there were Imperial troops, Anzacs,
+Africans, and they held over fifty-five miles of line. We advanced four
+miles, and papers on this continent blazed with the news. The English
+advanced nine miles on the same day, and there was not so much as a
+paragraph about it on this side of the Atlantic.
+
+For every overseas soldier wounded on the western front there are six of
+the Imperial troops wounded. This is true except at Lens, where the
+overseas casualties were considerably heavier.
+
+All this about Canada being in front is a German "terminological
+inexactitude" which is so despicable that we in Canada are ashamed that it
+should be said of us. It will injure us after the war; it will injure our
+prestige in the empire, which is now higher than ever before. We are not
+boasters and egotists, we are fighters. We are fighting men who live
+straight and who are proud to fight straight, and who are disgusted at lies
+such as this.
+
+The British, the Imperial troops, have done magnificently. They have done
+more than their share. The original agreement with France was to place
+fifty thousand men in that country should Germany ever attack. The British
+have five million troops under arms, of which only one-fifth are overseas.
+They have some five hundred thousand more men in France than have the
+French themselves.
+
+The British are fighting on many fronts. They are not fighting one war;
+they are fighting in German West Africa, they are in German East Africa. It
+was English troops who fought in the Cameroons. They are fighting in
+Mesopotamia and in Egypt. They have an army at Saloniki and in the Holy
+Land, and they have, of necessity, a large army in India, because the
+borders of that empire must be protected.
+
+And then we hear that the English are not doing anything! The English are
+feeding their own prisoners in Germany, because the Germans were starving
+them. They have been keeping some of their Allies in munitions and money.
+They have been sheltering refugees from every nation that has been
+devastated and overrun by the mad Huns. They have Belgians and French and
+Serbians and Poles--a vast concourse of all nations is sheltered on the
+little island which is the Motherland. It would be a poor thing if the
+dominions could not protect themselves.
+
+The British fleet has for three years kept the seas open for the neutral
+nations. The English fleet has protected Canada and other parts of the
+empire that have no navies of their own. The English must keep an army in
+England to protect her own shores. There was danger of invasion--that
+danger is past to all seeming, but it would not have passed had not the
+English had men on English soil.
+
+"And, you know, we think it dreadful that our boys are being sent over to
+France to fight for democracy when England is keeping her men back in
+safety in England."
+
+Another story this--another "terminological inexactitude." A fairly clever
+one. There is a half truth here. Yes; England has big reserves in England,
+and it's well for the world that she has. Well for the neutral world during
+these three years that England has her men in England.
+
+The English have good reserves and they are in England. They are there
+because England is nearer to the firing line than is the base in France.
+They are there because it is easier to transport troops by boat across the
+English Channel, which is a matter of twenty-one miles, and another twenty
+or thirty miles in a train on the French side, than it is to transport them
+in cattle cars over a congested railroad system from a base some twenty-six
+hours from the front line.
+
+Can not the people who hear these stories disprove them for themselves? Is
+there not a war-map sold in America? England is closer to the firing line
+than are portions of France, the portions of France which are used as
+bases. It takes twenty minutes for a German air-ship to reach England.
+
+Were the English soldiers all to be kept in France, in addition to being
+farther away from the line, they would still have to be fed. Is it better
+sense to keep them near to the food supply, or to send the reserves to
+France and use valuable tonnage to ship foodstuffs to them? There is no
+surplus food in France.
+
+It makes me tired and it makes every Britisher the same to think that such
+absurd stories should take effect. Of course the German is keen enough to
+recognize that there is already the will to think evil of England. He just
+wishes to season it a little and stir it up. He is wily, is the German
+propagandist.
+
+Then there is the hoary tale that England is keeping one hundred fifty
+thousand troops in Ireland to tyrannize over the poor Irish, while the
+States soldiers are sent to France to fight for democracy.
+
+This I also thought too obvious a lie for denial, but it has been repeated
+and repeated again. I do not know whether there are any English regiments
+stationed in Ireland at all. There are good barracks in that country, and
+good camps, so there may be.
+
+The Royal Irish Constabulary are quite able to cope at this time with any
+Sinn Fein disturbance which may arise. As far as the true Nationalist or
+Home Ruler is concerned, he has enlisted in British regiments and is
+fighting at the front. As far as the Ulsterman is concerned, he has
+enlisted long ago and is dead already or fighting still. The men of both
+sides who are over age are enlisted as Home Defense Volunteers, just as are
+the men of England, Scotland and Wales.
+
+So little is there tyranny over Ireland that when the Conscription Bill was
+passed in the British Imperial Parliament it was enacted only for England,
+Scotland and Wales. If it had included Ireland some one might have made the
+accusation of tyranny.
+
+In the United Kingdom there are no less freedom of action, freedom of
+speech and freedom of the individual than there are in America, and I
+include Canada in that word. They are as free as we, but they make no talk
+about it.
+
+The United Kingdom, with the rest of the empire, is fighting to retain her
+own democracy. If Germany had won during the three years the Allies have
+held the safety of the world, then the world would have been under the heel
+of autocracy.
+
+When I enlisted, and before I went over to England, I had no use for the
+Englishman myself; that was, the Englishman as we knew him in Western
+Canada. We had had specimens of "Algy boys," of "de Veres" and "Montmorency
+lads." These, we soon found out, were not the English true to type. They
+were ne'er-do-wells, remittance men, sent out of the way to the farthest
+point of the map.
+
+In England we were treated with wonderful hospitality. I began to change my
+opinion, but not wholly until I reached France. There I met Tommy
+Atkins--the soldier and the gentleman. There is no cleaner, cooler, better
+sport on the fighting line than Mr. Atkins. Occasionally when the Irish are
+in a brilliant charge, when the Scotch punish the enemy with a bit of
+dogged fighting, it is reported. When the Canadians do a forward sprint the
+world rings with it. When the English advance and advance again and hold
+position and hold yet more positions, there is not a whisper of it--not a
+word.
+
+I have no English blood in my veins, but I believe in fairness, I believe
+firmly that all the other nations of the empire put together have not done
+so much as have the English Tommies by themselves.
+
+There has come about a complete change in the Canadian mind in its attitude
+to the English. If, before this war, there was ever a possibility of our
+breaking away from the empire, that possibility is now dead--dead and
+buried beyond recall.
+
+This statement is not made at random. It is a considered sentence. At the
+Convention of the Great War Veterans' Association of Canada, the
+organization of the men returned from the world war, I was a delegate from
+my home town of Edmonton, Alberta. The first resolution at our first
+session was in effect--To propagate the good feeling between the dominions
+of the empire and between them and the Motherland; to continue the loyalty
+and devotion which have prompted us to fight for the old Union Jack.
+
+After all, the voice of the men who have fought and bled for their country
+is the voice of the people.
+
+Every criticism leveled at England or any other Ally from this side of the
+Atlantic is to throw a German stink-bomb for the Kaiser.
+
+Feuds remembered are thoughts which are futile. The England of to-day is
+not the England of 1812. It is not possible to blame the man of to-day for
+the work of his great-grandfather. Read history and find out the
+nationality of the George who ruled in England in those far distant days.
+He was a German, spoke German, and could not read a word of the language of
+the country on whose throne he sat.
+
+The Lloyd George of ten years ago was the most hated and hooted man in
+Britain. He is not the Lloyd George of ten years ago to-day, he is the
+Lloyd George of the present--the most loved and respected man on earth.
+
+The American people and the British are fundamentally alike. They are of
+the one stock. They have the same ideals and principles. If the English did
+not make sacrifices in other days, to-day they are making a sacrifice as
+great, or maybe greater, than others of the Allies.
+
+The joining of the peoples of America and Britain in a tie which can never
+be broken is imminent. The knot is in the making.
+
+In keeping with the dastardly methods of "frightfulness" in Europe, the
+German propagandist has thought on this side to strike at the women--to
+terrify the mothers.
+
+It is terribly hard for women to let their men go. We know that. Our women
+know it, but they are ashamed should one of their men attempt to hold back.
+The German lie-mongers whisper: "It is the last time you will see your boy.
+It is certain death on the western front."
+
+It is not so. The Canadian troops altogether have used up some four hundred
+fifty thousand in three years. Of this number, in the three years of severe
+fighting, only five per cent. have been killed. Of the four and a half
+million, approximately, who have been wounded in the fighting of three
+years, only two and a half per cent. have died of their wounds.
+
+It is bad enough, but it is not nearly so bad as the German scare
+manufacturer would seek to make out. Boys come through without a scratch.
+Not many, certainly, but they come through. There is every reason to
+believe that you will get your boy back. There is still more reason to
+believe that if you hold that thought before him while he is still with
+you, and hold that thought before yourself when he is gone, he will come
+back.
+
+Women have a tremendous responsibility in this war. Wars are always women's
+wars, mothers' wars. We boys have courage and we need it, but we also need
+the greater courage of those women we have left behind to back us up. They
+have to bear the brunt of the war, which to them is a fight of endurance
+and eternal, everlasting waiting--waiting--waiting.
+
+Do not think of the sorrow of his leaving, think of the pride of his going.
+
+The martial spirit is not actively abroad on this side of the Atlantic yet.
+Wait till the boys get over to France; wait till they see the outrages on
+women and on nature, and all the blood of their fighting ancestors will
+boil with indignation and rage. They will thank God that they have come to
+prevent such a devastation on the soil of their own homeland.
+
+In the trenches the boys compare the merits of their mothers. It is a
+wonderful thing, that spirit of mother love which surrounds us, blesses us
+and leads us on to higher things. We gather together in the trench and we
+talk of mother--mother--mother. The lad whose mother cried and fainted when
+he left quietly drops out from the group. We always know him. He is just a
+tiny bit afraid that we will ask him how his mother sent him off. He never
+shows his letters from home, because it is possible that she writes him
+laments and moanings. He is ashamed. But those of us who have a home
+courage of which we talk--how we boast! Mother is a mighty factor in the
+winning of the war.
+
+Out to France we go for Flag and Country. "Over the top" we go for Mother.
+And mother, that one simple word, embraces the whole of womanhood.
+
+Remember that your boy is going for you. Talk to the French mother, to the
+English mother, who has lost all. Ask her about the war, about peace.
+"Peace, yes, we all want peace, but not a German peace. If all the menfolk
+die and there is no one else to go, why, we will carry on!"
+
+And here I want to ask: What is the pacifist in this country doing for
+peace? Nothing. He is only trying to put off this war, for a worse war.
+Every man, woman or child who talks peace before the complete defeat of
+Germany is a Kaiser agent, spreading German poison gas to the injury and
+possible destruction of his own countrymen.
+
+Back at home we must have the United Spirit which is inspiring us at the
+front. After all, it is not the body which is going to take us through to
+ultimate victory; it is the Spirit. And because American arms ultimately
+will be the deciding factor in this war, so will American womanhood. From
+what I have seen already, I have no hesitation in saying that the American
+mother will be just as true to herself as the English and French mother has
+been.
+
+Let him go with a smile, and if you can't smile, whistle. You can never
+know how much it means to him. We at the front are undaunted. If there ever
+had been a thought of defeat, to-day, with the American arms beside us, we
+are certain of a sure and glorious victory.
+
+Because we know that if Cæsar crossed the Rhine for Rome, and Napoleon
+crossed it for France and autocracy, so shall we, the Freemen of the
+world, not only cross the Rhine, but will march even to Berlin for the sake
+of Liberty, of Love, of Right and of Democracy.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+THE LAST CHAPTER
+
+by
+
+"HERSELF"
+
+
+War! It was the first of August, 1914, and I almost ran home from the city
+to tell the news to my people.
+
+War! It was like we'd be in it. War between England and Germany. That war
+we had all heard of and knew was inevitable. The war of the ages was
+imminent.
+
+I had been free-lancing in Fleet Street for the past three months. Left
+_The Daily Chronicle_ over the Home Rule questions, as well as other
+things.
+
+I was in Ireland for the Ulster gun-running. Ireland was a seething mass of
+German-inspired sedition south of the Boyne. The authorities apparently
+would not listen to the warnings of Ulster. But Ulster was ready for
+anything. There were hospitals, clearing stations, bases. There were
+despatch riders, signalers, transport men, all in readiness, besides the
+ordinary infantry volunteers, who were pledged by all means in their power
+to keep Ireland under the flag of the Union.
+
+I was in a little country church one Sunday morning. A roll of a drum and
+the skirl of a fife came wafting across the valley on the April breeze. The
+minister paused a moment in his sermon. Two, three, half a dozen men rose
+and softly left. They were going to the rendezvous in case of alarm. No one
+knew what might happen. A conflagration might flare out at a moment's
+notice.
+
+But in August there came war, real war. Civilization was threatened. Ulster
+handed over men, guns, ammunition, hospitals and nurses to the Imperial
+government. Hundreds of the Ulster Volunteers in the Ulster Division have
+died for Britain. Hundreds of the men south of the Boyne who have not been
+bitten with the microbe of revolution, and a mistaken idea that England is
+a tyrant, have died for the cause of world Liberty.
+
+How we lived through those first electric four days of August! Would the
+Liberal government funk? We doubted them unjustly. Then came
+the devastation of Belgium, and Britain gave Germany its
+disappointment--Britain declared war. Ireland rallied round the brave old
+Union Jack; the colonies, rather we call them now the dominions overseas,
+India, Africa, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the smaller islands, sent
+word that they were with us to a man.
+
+And then the fight commenced. Those casualty lists of the first Imperial
+Army! God in Heaven! The thud of distant guns, and then nearer and nearer
+we could hear in London the rumble of the enemy artillery as though of
+thunder. Smoke drifted over, and we lived in a pall of death.
+
+It was in October that Fate's apparent working showed itself.
+
+"This war will alter our lives very greatly," said my aunt one evening in
+this month, as we sat around the fire. We have all a trace of second sight.
+Most old families of the north of Ireland can claim to be "fey."
+
+"It will," said I, "for free-lancing is getting played out. I shall have to
+get steady work."
+
+No more was said, and no special work came my way. It was useless to
+attempt to train for nursing. I had no aptitude for that, and munition
+workers of our sex were not called yet.
+
+Then the Canadians came. The First Contingent. For the most part big,
+strong, hefty-looking men; well uniformed, well set up. Eighty-seven per
+cent. of them Old Country born.
+
+Among them my cousin, Peter Watson. Dear old man Peter, I wonder do you
+know of my happiness which is the outcome of your journey "West"? I wish
+you might know it, and share some of the joy. Yours was a lonely and a
+sensitive soul.
+
+Peter had been in the Suffolks. A lieutenant in the Imperial Army. Money
+was scarce and he threw up his commission. He tried Canada as a fortune
+making ground. Lingered a while in Calgary, and when war broke out enlisted
+in the now famous Fighting Tenth.
+
+Peter came up from Salisbury to see us. He met me in town a few times. We
+lunched, dined, did a theater. He brought pals with him. There was Sandy
+Clark. Poor old Sandy! I have his collar badge C10. Another soldier took it
+off his tunic for me before they buried him. A sniper got Sandy in June,
+1916.
+
+There was Farmer. He was a signaler, and was transferred. I saw his name
+listed killed, too. I don't know where. There were half a dozen other
+Canadian boys, Peter and myself. We lunched one day at Pinoli's in Rupert
+Street. We pledged to our next meeting after the war at the same place. We
+shan't meet at Pinoli's. There is none of the boys alive. I only live of
+all the party. It was a strange thing that day. I did not know it would be
+the last time I should see Peter, but he came back from down the street and
+kissed me "good-by" a second time. I wondered. Old man Peter.
+
+The war has come home to our family. There is none of us left. Tom Small,
+my step-brother, is still living and still fighting. I pray his safety to
+the end. They all went, one after the other. The last to go was Hugh. July,
+1916, on the eleventh day he was killed. Dear old boy, it is unrealizeable
+yet. You won the military Cross and you won yet another undying honor. You
+were sniped in the glory of completing a fine piece of work. Your six feet
+of glorious young manhood lie deep in French soil. Good-by, Hugh!
+
+Peter was reported missing. All of us who were left alive tried every means
+of which we knew and of which we heard to find a trace of him. We got none.
+At last I decided that an advertisement in a daily paper would bring
+replies from wounded soldiers. I advertised in _The Daily Express_. The
+advertisement appeared on a Wednesday, and on the Thursday morning I had a
+letter from a young Canadian soldier of the Third Battalion who was in the
+Royal Herbert Hospital at Woolwich. He told me of knowing something of what
+may have happened to Peter. The possibilities were that he was blown up in
+company with a trench full of other soldiers. There is little reason to
+doubt this awful ending to a young life; there is no evidence of anything
+else.
+
+The letter of the young Canadian soldier was kindly and frank in tone. I
+answered it, and asked if he had any relations in the Old Country. He
+replied that he had not, and we decided that we would go and see him in
+hospital and try in some way to help him in his loneliness.
+
+[Illustration: ©_Famous Players--Lasky Corporation. Scene from the
+Photo-Play_
+
+"THEY LOOK BIG ENOUGH, DON'T THEY?"]
+
+[Illustration: A close shave in Flanders]
+
+Before seeing the soldier I received several other letters, notably from
+Sam J. Peters, who came to see us, and was positive that he knew Peter as a
+man who had aided him on his being wounded himself. Lance-Corporal Carey
+was another who wrote, and Corporal George A. Vowel, known as Black Jack,
+then of the Tenth and now of the Thirteenth Machine Gun Corps, wrote a
+kindly letter.
+
+On a Saturday afternoon we went down to Woolwich, and after a short chat
+with a nurse in charge were allowed to see the Canadian who had written
+first. Private Harold R. Peat was slight, small, and looked almost
+emaciated. We talked for some time and he showed us several souvenirs which
+he had. We liked him, and promised to come back. He agreed that he would
+get a pass for the following Sunday so that we could see him in the
+regulation hours.
+
+He mentioned during conversation how he had seen the advertisement in _The
+Daily Express_, and how he always had the desire to comfort those who had
+lost relatives, especially when all the official information could give was
+"missing."
+
+On the next day it occurred to me that the days must hang long on such a
+boy's hands, and I forthwith wrote him a card with some small joke on it.
+He replied by a letter. Soon we wrote to each other every day. It was quite
+amusing, and at times our letters amounted to a war of wits and repartee.
+
+Our friendship grew, and then he got well enough to leave the hospital. We
+wrote regularly, but finally there were more hospital visits to make when,
+as a paralyzed wreck of a youth, he was sent back from France. Private Peat
+rallied quickly, and to my astonishment one day he walked in to see me at
+the offices where the Efficiency Engineers had their headquarters.
+
+"Time for me to come and see you!" he exclaimed. I brought him into the
+reception room, left him for two minutes until I made some arrangements as
+to work. When I returned he was in a faint, from which it took some time to
+rouse him. His convalescent camp was in the country, and he had trudged
+some five miles of muddy road in the rain in his endeavor to reach a
+railway station with the ultimate object in view of visiting me.
+
+We saw each other frequently from this time. My dear friend, Amy Naylor,
+jokingly warned me: "Be careful, Bebe, you are playing with fire." I
+laughed. I had other ideas, but nevertheless her words made me think. I
+found out that I, for one, was not playing. It remained to find out whether
+the other party to the game believed it a pastime, or something of more
+moment.
+
+Soon there came word that certain of the disabled men were to be returned
+to Canada for discharge. Private Peat was among them. He had word that he
+would soon receive a commission, though he would not again be fit for
+active service.
+
+Without one word spoken, it came to be understood between us that it would
+only be a matter of time before I would go to Canada to join him. Fate
+seemed to arrange the matter silently that at some indefinite time when
+"he" had had time to look around and "see how things were," he would send
+for me.
+
+It was a matter of weeks before I got a cable: "Come now." I came.
+
+We met through tragedy. My husband has all the sacredness to me of having
+come back to me from the brink of the grave. He has all the wonder of a man
+who has offered, and is willing to offer his life again for right. He has
+all the glory of a man who had not to be "fetched." He went.
+
+He is friend, pal and husband all in one. Of Peter, the unconscious
+instrument of Fate's working, we must say of him but one thing: "He died
+for his country."
+
+[Illustration: SIGNS OF RANKS FROM THE TRENCH MAGAZINE]
+
+
+
+
+THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF A SOLDIER WHILE ON ACTIVE SERVICE
+
+
+    1. When on guard thou wilt challenge all parties approaching thee.
+
+    2. Thou shalt not send any engraving nor any likeness of any
+    air-ship in Heaven above or on any postcard of the Earth beneath,
+    nor any drawing of any submarine under the sea, for I, the Censor,
+    am a jealous Censor, visiting the iniquities of the offenders with
+    three months C.B., but showing mercy unto thousands by letting
+    their letters go free who keep my commandments.
+
+    3. Thou shalt not use profane language unless under extraordinary
+    circumstances, such as seeing your comrade shot, or getting coal
+    oil in your tea.
+
+    4. Remember the soldier's week consists of seven days: six days
+    shalt thou labor and do all thy work, and on the seventh do all
+    thy odd jobs.
+
+    5. Honor your President and your Country, keep your rifle oiled
+    and shoot straight that thy days may be long upon the land which
+    the enemy giveth thee.
+
+    6. Thou shalt not steal thy comrade's kit.
+
+    7. Thou shalt not kill--TIME.
+
+    8. Thou shalt not adulterate thy mess tin by using it as a shaving
+    mug.
+
+    9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy comrades but
+    preserve a strict neutrality on his outgoings and his incomings.
+
+    10. Thou shalt not covet thy sergeant's post, nor the corporal's
+    nor the staff major's, but do thy duty and by dint of perseverance
+    rise to the high position of major general.
+
+
+
+
+SOME THINGS THAT WE OUGHT AND OUGHT NOT TO SEND
+
+
+Candies, cigarettes--and ordinary, plain cigarettes are good enough, so
+long as you send plenty. If he chews, send him chewing. Cigarettes are an
+absolute necessity because they are the only things soothing to the nerves
+when under heavy shell fire. Powdered milk in small quantities, or
+Horlick's Milk Tablets, are always welcome. Pure jam; don't ever make a
+mistake in this and send plum and apple, because if he ever gets back
+alive, he will surely take your life for making such a terrible
+mistake--different fruit preserves they long for. Never send corned beef.
+This would be even a worse crime than the plum and apple jam. A pair of
+sox, home-made and pure wool, you ought to send once a week, because you
+must remember the Red Cross takes care only of the wounded men and not the
+fighters in the trenches; the government and home folks must look after the
+fighter in the field. Three-finger mittens knitted up to the elbow, with
+the first finger absolutely bare, are very welcome. Scarfs are quite
+unnecessary. Tommy usually gives these to the French lassies. Different
+insect powders Tommy likes to get, because he can't buy these out there.
+There is no doubt about it that, although we get used to the "cooties," yet
+sometimes they outnumber us and it is necessary to put a gas attack over on
+them. Strong powders are the only thing. Candles, matches, and if possible
+small alcoholic burners are very essential things. Of course, if you send
+him a burner it would be necessary for you to keep sending him alcohol,
+because this can't be bought in France. Nor can we get sugar out there. Any
+of these things with a nice long "letter" will delight Tommy or Sammy or
+Poilou.
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber's note: Minor typographical errors in the original text have
+                    been corrected.
+
+
+
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