"Chatting" was the professional term for hunting on the Western Front. It is simply searching for your gray-back foes, and dispatching them by the medium of one's nails. Another method, practiced by highly trained experts, is to take a lighted candle and run it up and down the seams of your clothes. None but the very expert can do this as it often results in burning holes in your clothes.
Church parade took place the Sunday before we left for further work with the Huns. The General was to look us over. It was a lovely morning when we lined up in the field awaiting our leader. The scene will live in my memory as long as I exist. Very few traces of war could be seen here. The field was carpeted with a thick growth of beautiful green grass, while the spring flowers were perfect in their beauty and fragrance. Tall poplars fringed three sides of the field, and the breeze bent them gracefully this way and that. The soft, sighing sound of this gentle wind, playing through the poplars, seemed to be a sweet requiem for the very gallant gentlemen of England and Canada who would parade with us no more.
And the men. God! the wonder and pathos of it. To see them standing easy, chatting and joking one with the other, one would have thought war was non-existent. But take a closer look. See those faded, patched uniforms, mud-stained and blood-stained, yet spotless as far as human effort could make them. And the look in their eyes; the look! that far-away, dreamy pathetic stare of men who have looked straight into the mouth of hell.
A strange contrast they made to the newly arrived reinforcements from England. The latter, with their clean uniforms and their fresh faces, looked very boyish and young against the boys who had been through the jaws of death at Ypres.
All familiar with the history of Canada's part in the great conflict, know the speech delivered to us by the General, and his words of confidence and advice for the future. His splendid talk inspired all of us with renewed faith in our fight.
After a reorganization, we soon were ready to interview the Fritzers again, and before long we were engaged in another scrap that in some respects surpassed even Ypres for its proportion of casualties on a narrow front.
Our work this time was to take over a section of the line that was in imminent danger of being broken; few people in these later days ever dream of the nearness of the Allies to absolute defeat in the first months of the war.
Now I have something to tell those people, who are forever lauding the deeds of Britain's Allies, and forever forgetting that Tommy Atkins, the British soldier, does a little fighting, too.
We hear of the tragedy of Belgium, and God forgive any man who fails to honor that noble little nation; we hear of the soul of France, the Anzacs, the Canadians, but very little is said of the men who quietly, without fuss or advertisement, lay down their lives in this great conflict, the Tommies of Great Britain—
"For he does not advertise, but he wins the day or dies."