And there was sister, the daughter—sister—sister. At sight of these young girls—from thirteen up to twenty and over—we learned, if we had not learned before, that this is a war in which every decent man must fight. Some Americans and Canadians may not want to go overseas; they may be opposed to fighting; they may think they are not needed. Let them once see what we saw that April morning and nothing in the world could keep them at home.
They dragged along with heads low, and eyes seeking the ground in a shame not of their own making. I am conservative when I say that one in four of the hundreds of young girls who walked along in that sad crowd had a baby, or was about to have one.
And that was not the only horror of their situation. Many of them had one or the other arm off at the elbow. They had not only been ruined, but mutilated by their barbarous enemies.
That evening we camped just outside the city of Ypres. We rested all night, and the next day we went into action. During the afternoon of April twenty-second the Germans, for the first time in the history of warfare, used poisonous gas. And they used it against us as we lay there ready to protect the Ypres salient.
CHAPTER XII
CANADIANS—THAT'S ALL
Less than three months before this we were raw recruits. We were considered greenhorns and absolutely undisciplined. We had had little of trench experience. At Neuve Chapelle we had "stood by." At Hill 60 we had watched the fun. But our discipline, our real mettle, had not yet been put to the test.
That evening of the twenty-second of April when we marched out from Ypres, little did any of us realize that within the next twenty-four hours more than one-half of our total effectives were to be no more.