That evening orders came through that we were to march out again and we followed the old line along the hedges and ditches back to our transport. We found that our transport had been moved further back to a field on the Ypres Poperinghe Road to avoid shelling. We were all thoroughly done out when we arrived and we had a good sleep.
Next morning we had roll call and counted our losses. It was the saddest moment in the history of our regiment.
The "roll call" showed killed, wounded and missing, seventeen officers and six hundred and seventy-four men, a fearful total of six hundred and ninety-one out of a battalion of nine hundred and twelve effectives. Seven officers and one hundred and fifty-seven men, all of them gassed and wounded, were taken prisoners. The rest had paid the price of Empire. As the wounded I had sometimes pitied had always said, "That is what we came here for," but it was very hard to be reconciled to the loss of the flower of the regiment. Of all our officers only Major Marshall and myself were left unhurt. How we escaped the Lord alone knows. His mercy was very great. How jealous we had all been of the lives of the men. What care we had all bestowed on their drill, their discipline, their health and equipment. We were all a happy family, no quarrelling, no disputes either among the officers or men. Everyone tried to live up to the best traditions of the old Highland Regiments that oftentimes went through campaigns without a crime. When we reached France not a dozen men in the battalion had entries on their conduct sheets. We all fondly hoped that our efficiency, our courage and power would be reserved for some great day when we would march triumphantly through the German trenches, charging with our bayonets and clearing the road to Brussels, the Rhine, and Berlin.
But our day came differently to what we expected. Still we did our duty. Had we come to grief through any blunder or fault of mine or any of our officers there might have been cause for regret and heartburnings. Our orders were very simple—to hold the trenches at all costs until relieved. We carried out these orders and held the line. When finally ordered out we left nearly four hundred dead in the trenches.
Often during our days and marches in Flanders, in admiration of the men of my regiment and the other gallant men of the First Canadian Division, there would recur to me the words spoken at St. Helene by Napoleon of the men of the Army of Italy:
"Another libeller says that I conquered Italy with a few thousand galley slaves. Now the fact is that probably so fine an army never had existed before. More than half of them were men of education, the sons of merchants, of lawyers, of physicians, of the better order of farmer and bourgeoise. Two thirds of them knew how to write and were capable of being made officers. Indeed in the regiment it would have puzzled me to decide who were the most deserving subjects, or who best merited promotion, as they were all so good. Oh! that all my armies had been the same."
A new form of "casualty" had been written into the records of the hospitals and dressing stations, "suffering from" and "died of gas poisoning."
If there is a law of compensation which evens up injustice, if there is an avenging Deity, then the German nation is doomed to die and be forgotten. Cowardly methods of attack will ultimately sap the vigor and courage of their men, and they will curse the day when their ruler wrote them into the history of the ages as a race of cowardly poisoners, unfit even to stand alongside of the Red Indians or the savages of the Soudan.
The tortures inflicted by savages of burning and flaying alive are not comparable to the torture of burning lungs with tissues seared as with a red hot iron. The agony which often ended in gangrene of the lungs was worse than a thousand deaths from pneumonia and the suffering is very long drawn out.
I know whereof I speak as to the torture of scorched lungs, and my case, I am thankful to say, was not as severe as many of them.