"I'll let you know when there's to be another show," said Howell, as we parted at corps headquarters; but none could ever surpass this one in its success or its opportunity of intimate observation.
This was the last time I saw him. A few days later, on one of his tours to study the ground for an attack, he was killed by a shell. Army custom permits the mention of his name because he is dead. He was a steadfast friend, an able soldier, an upright, kindly, high-minded gentleman; and when I was asked, not by the lady who had never kept up her interest so long in anything as in this war, but by another, if living at the front is a big strain, the answer is in the word that comes that a man whom you have just seen in the fulness of life and strength is gone.
XXV
CANADA IS STUBBORN
What is Canada fighting for?—The Kaiser has brought Canadians together—The land of immense distances—Canada's unfaltering spirit—Canada our nearest neighbor geographically and sentimentally—Ypres salient mud—Canadians invented the trench raid—A wrestling fight in the mud—Germans "try it on" the Canadians—"The limit" in artillery fire—Maple Leaf spirit—Baseball talk on the firing line—A good sprinkling of Americans.
One day the Canadians were to lift their feet out of the mire of the Ypres salient and take the high, dry road to the Somme front, and anyone with a whit of chivalry in his soul would have rejoiced to know that they were to have their part in the big movement of Sept. 15th. But let us consider other things and other fighting before we come to the taking of Courcelette.
When I was home in the winter of 1915-16, for the first time the border between the United States and Canada drew a line in sharp contrasts. The newspapers in Canada had their casualty lists, parents were giving their sons and wives their husbands to go three thousand miles to endure hardship and risk death for a cause which to them had no qualifications of a philosophic internationalism. Everything was distinct. Sacrifice and fortitude, life and death, and the simple meaning words were masters of the vocabulary.
Some people might ask why Canada should be pouring out her blood in Europe; what had Flanders to do with her? England was fighting to save her island, France for the sanctity of her soil, but what was Canada fighting for? As I understood it, she was fighting for Canada. A blow had been struck against her, though it was struck across the Atlantic, and across the Atlantic she was going to strike back.
She had had no great formative war. Pardeburg was a kind of expedition of brave men, like the taking of San Juan Hill. It did not sink deep into the consciousness of the average Canadian, who knew only that some neighbor of his had been in South Africa. Our own formative war was the Revolution, not the Civil War where brother fought brother. The Revolution made a mold which, perhaps, instead of being impressed upon succeeding generations of immigrants may have only given a veneer to them. A war may be necessary to make them molten for another shaping.