Exactly one week after I had watched our scarred and shaken but still valiant Canadian soldiers on their way out of the trenches of Maple Copse and Sanctuary Wood, after the third fiercest struggle that has taken place in the Ypres Salient, I stood and marked the passage of the men of the relieving battalions. It was in the chief street of a little town whose church and houses were cruelly disfigured by German shells. The sound of drum and fife was heard, and the whole populace ran to doors and windows. On every lip the cry was heard--
"The Guards--the Guards! They are coming out!"
On they came in column of route, these tall, stern, bronzed men, chins up, eyes front, jaws set, marching with all the firmness and precision of a dress parade, marching as if the eyes of His Majesty the King were upon them, as I had seen them march in scarlet tunics and monstrous busbies in Hyde Park, at Aldershot, on the Horse Guards Parade, the same men, and yet, alas, not the same. You forgot--nay, you did not see--their shabby, faded, stained khaki uniforms, the shapeless steel basins on their heads, the untidy linen sacks slung on their shoulders; you only saw the men, the brave, strong men, the triumph of training, the justification of discipline, the vindication of the old despised Imperial military system, the glory of the British Army--the Guards.
No wonder eyes gleamed and cheeks mantled in that little Flemish town, which has seen so many units of the British Army pass and repass the mouth of hell, whose lips are the hitherward parallel roadways and whose gnashing teeth are the front trenches. Six days before the same scene had been enacted when the cry ran--
"The Guards! They are going in!"
And they went in--the Coldstreams and the Grenadiers--to take over the trenches from the Canadians, to delve and sweat, carrying loads of ammunition on their backs, crawling into No Man's Land, laying mines, shooting Germans or braining them with the butts of their rifles, or treating them to the cold steel, as imperturbable as you see them now--it being all in the day's work. The popularity of the Guards arouses no jealousy in the other divisions. "We don't grudge 'em what they get," remarked a sergeant in a line regiment; "they work hard, and they deserve it. They've got a big name to keep up."
And yet it was one of these same Guards who an hour later, with more emotion than I would have thought credible, waving his brawny hand backwards towards the line, said:
"The Canadians--yes, sir, perhaps we have something they haven't got. But--excuse the liberty, sir--by God, we take off our hats to them! I tell you what, sir, they're MEN! They saved the Salient!"
EPILOGUE.
YPRES, June 24th.