"Their discipline is different from ours," said a British general, "but it works out. They are splendid. I ask for no better troops."
They may have lacked the etiquette of discipline of British regulars, but they had the natural discipline of self-reliance and of "go to it" when a crisis came. This trench was only an introduction, a preparation for a thing which was about as real as ever fell to the lot of any soldiers. It is not for me to tell here the story of their part in the second battle of Ypres, when the gas fumes rolled in upon them. I should like to tell it and also the story of the deeds of many British regiments, from the time of Mons to Festubert. All Canada knows it in detail from their own correspondents and their record officer. England will one day know about her regiments; her stubborn regiments of the line, her county regiments, who have won the admiration of all the crack regiments, whether English or Scots.
"When that gas came along," said one Canadian, who expressed the Canadian spirit, "we knew the Boches were springing a new one on us. You know how it is if a man is hit in the face by a cloud of smoke when he is going into a burning building to get somebody out. He draws back—and then he goes in. We went in. We charged—well, it was the way we felt about it. We wanted to get at them and we were boiling mad over such a dastardly kind of attack."
Higher authorities than any civilian have testified to how that charge helped, if it did not save, the situation. And then at Givenchy—straight work into the enemy's trenches under the guns. Canada is part of the British Empire and a precious part; but the Canadians, all imperial politics aside, fought their way into the affection of the British army, if they did not already possess it. They made the Rocky Mountains seem more majestic and the Thousand Islands more lovely.
If there are some people in the United States busy with their own affairs who look on the Canadians as living up north somewhere toward the Arctic Circle and not very numerous, that old criterion of worth which discovers in the glare of battle's publicity merit which already existed has given to the name Canadian a glory which can be appreciated only with the perspective of time. The Civil War left us a martial tradition; they have won theirs. Some day a few of their neutral neighbours who fought by their side will be joining in their army reunions and remarking, "Wasn't that mud in Flanders———" etc.
My thanks to the Canadians for being at the front. They brought me back to the plains and the North-West, and they showed the Germans on some occasions what a blizzard is like when expressed in bullets instead of in snowflakes, by men who know how to shoot. I had continental pride in them. They had the dry, pungent philosophy and the indomitable optimism which the air of the plains and the St. Lawrence valley seems to develop. They were not afraid to be a little emotional and sentimental. There is room for that sort of thing between Vancouver and Halifax. They had been in some "tough scraps" which they saw clear-eyed, as they would see a boxing- match or a spill from a canoe into a Canadian rapids.
As for the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, old soldiers of the South African campaign almost without exception, knowing and hardened, their veteran experience gave them an earlier opportunity in the trenches than the first Canadian division. Brigaded with British regulars, the Princess Pat's were a sort of corps d'élite. Colonel Francis Farquhar, known as "Fanny," was their colonel, and he knew his men. After he was killed his spirit remained with them. Asked if they could stick they said, "Yes, sir!" cheerily, as he would have wanted them to say it.
I am going to tell the story of their fight of May 8th, not to single them out from any other Canadian battalion, or any British battalions, but because the story came to me and it seemed illuminative of what other battalions had endured, this one picturesquely because of its membership and its distance from home.
Losses in that Ypres salient at St. Eloi the P.P.s had suffered in the winter, dribbling, day-by-day losses, and heavier ones when they had made attacks and repulsed attacks. They had been holding down the lid of hell heretofore, as one said graphically, and on May 8th, to use his simile again, they held on to the edge of the opening by the skin of their teeth and looked down into the bowels of hell after the Germans had blown the lid off with high explosives.
It was in a big château that I heard the story—a story characteristic of modern warfare at its highest pitch—and felt its thrill when told by the tongues of its participants. There were twenty bedrooms in that château. If I wished to stay all night I might occupy three or four. As for the bathroom, paradise to men who have been buried in filthy mud by high explosives, the Frenchman who planned it had the most spacious ideas of immersion. A tub, or a shower, or a hose, as you pleased. Some bathroom, that!