The Canadians who had to "mop up" had the "time of their lives" and some ticklish moments. What a scene! Germans in clean uniforms coming out of their dugouts blinking in surprise at their undoing and in disgust, resentment and suppressed rage! Canadians, dust-covered from shell-bursts, eyes flashing, laughing, rushing about on the job in the midst of shouts of congratulation and directions to prisoners among the ruins, and the German commander so angered by the loss of the village that he began pouring in shells on Germans and Canadians at the same time! Two colonels were among the captured, a regimental and a battalion commander. The senior was a baron—one cannot leave him out of any narrative—and inclined to bear himself with patrician contempt toward the Canadian democracy, which is a mistake for barons in his situation with every Canadian more or less of a king that day. When he tried to start his men into a revolt his hosts acted promptly, with the result that the uprising was nipped in the bud and the baron was shot through the leg, leaving him still "fractious and patronizing." Then the little colonel of the French-Canadians said, "I think I might as well shoot you in a more vital part and have done with it!" or something equally to the point and suddenly the baron became quite democratic himself.
One of the battalions that took Courcelette was French-Canadian. No other Canadian battalion will deny them the glory that they won that day, and it must have been irritating to the German baron to surrender superior numbers to the stocky type that we see in New England factory towns and on their farms in Quebec, for they now formed the battalion, the frontiersmen, the courrier de bois, having been mostly killed in the salient. Shall I forget that little private, forty years old if he were a day, with a hole from shrapnel in his steel helmet and the bit of purple and white ribbon worn proudly on his breast, who, when I asked him how he felt after he received the clout from a shell-fragment, remarked blandly that it had knocked him down and made his head ache!
"You have the military cross!" I said.
"Yais, sir. I'm going to win the Victoria Cross!" he replied, saluting. Talk about "the spirit that quickeneth!"
Or, shall I forget the French-Canadian colonel telling his story of how he and the battalion on his left in equal difficulties held the line beyond Courcelette with his scattered men against thirteen counter-attacks that night; how he had to go from point to point establishing his posts in the dark, and his repeated "'I golly!" of wonder at how he had managed to hold on, with its ring of naïve unrealization of the humor of being knocked over by a shell and finding, "'I golly!" that he had not been hurt! They had not enlisted freely, the French-Canadians, but those who had proved that if the war emotion had taken hold of them as it had of the rest of Canada they would not have been found wanting.
"'I golly!" they had to fight from the very fact that there were only a few to strike for old France and for the martial honor of Quebec. And they held all they took as sturdily as the other Canadian battalion in front of the village when the Germans awakened to revenge for the loss of Courcelette.
From start to finish of that great day it had been quickness that counted; quickness to realize opportunities; alertness of individual action in "mopping up" after the village was taken; prompt adaptability to situations which is the gift of the men of a new country; and that individual confidence of the Canadian once he was not tied to a trench and might let his initiative have full play, man to man, which is not a thing of drill or training but of inheritance and environment. On the right, Martinpuich was taken by the British and also held.
It was in rain and mist after the battle, while the dead still lay on the field, that I went over the Ridge and along the path of the Canadian charges, wondering how they had passed through the curtains of fire when I saw shrapnel cases so thick that you could step from one to another; wondering how men could survive in the shell-craters and the poor, tumbled trenches in the soft, shell-mashed earth; wondering at the whole business of their being here in France, a veteran army two years after the war had begun. I saw them dripping from the rains, mud-spattered, but in the joy of having made good when their turn came, and in a way that was an exemplification of Canadian character in every detail. "Heap good!" I suppose that big Sioux Indian, looking as natural seated in a trench in his imperturbability as if he were seated in front of his tepee, would have put it. He was seeing a strange business, but high explosives shaking the earth, aeroplanes overhead, machine guns rattling in the war of the Pale Faces he accepted without emotion.
With the second battle of Ypres, with St. Eloi, Hooge, Mount Sorrell, and Observatory Ridge, Courcelette had completed the cycle of soldierly experiences for those who bore the Maple Leaf in France of the Fleur-de-lis. Officers and men of every walk of life called to a new occupation, a democracy out of the west submitting to discipline had been inured and trained to a new life of risk and comradeship and sacrifice for a cause. It will seem strange to be out of khaki and to go to the office, or the store, or to get up to milk the cows at dawn; "but," as one man said, "we'll manage to adapt ourselves to it without spending nights in a mud hole or asking the neighbors to throw any bombs over the fence in order to make the change gradual."