Another man told me that he saw boys lying dead who looked no older than fourteen, and it made him feel sick. They could not all have been like that, these men of the 155th and 156th Reserve Regiments, regiments from whom some of the prisoners come, because they are making a very stiff fight in some parts of their defensive system, and the Canadians have real men against them. It seems that Hill 70 was held lightly and by the younger class of soldiers, the best Prussian troops being kept back to hold the inner defences of Lens, and to make counter-attacks.
"It was a walk-over," said a Canadian, describing the assault on the hill. "Our barrage was great, and it had simply smashed the ground to pulp. I thought it a worse wreck than Vimy, which was some wreck. One could just see a faint suggestion of trenches, but everything was clean swept. There were two or three machine-gun emplacements which gave us a bit of trouble, but not much. We jumped on them and wiped them out. I can't say I saw many German dead, but just a few boys. I expect the others were buried and smashed up." These Canadians were wonderful. They went into the battle with an absolute confidence. "I knew we should do the trick," said one of them, who came walking back with a wound in his thigh, "and all my pals were of the same mind."
He said one amazing thing, lying there waiting for his operation in the back parlour of a miner's cottage, in one of these mazes into which the enemy was plugging shells at times: "I enjoyed the show very much," he said, "it was a fair treat."
Next to him lay another badly wounded man with a piece of wire plucked from his own flesh wrapped up in a piece of cotton-wool as a trophy, and a hole through his leg. He grinned at me and said: "We put it across them all right. I wouldn't have missed it, but I'm sorry I got this leg messed up. I didn't come over to get a Blighty wound. I want to see the end of this war. That's what I want to do. I want to be in at the end."
The wounded men came back like that unless they came back with only the soles of their boots showing over the edge of the ambulance. Fortunately, up to midday at least, there were not many badly wounded men. The spirit of men who have fought and fought and seen the worst horrors of war, and suffered its most hideous discomforts, is one of those miracles which I do not understand. I only record the fact about these hardy Canadians and the Canadian Scottish.
Of the same character are the civilian inhabitants of one of these mining cités on the edge of the battlefields, where they have remained since the beginning of the war. Nearer even than the edge. They live in streets where most of the houses have been hit and many of them wrecked. Death comes about and above them. Many of the people have been killed, and the children go to school in cellars with gas-masks because of the poison, that comes on an east wind or a north. They were there again to-day: old women drinking early morning coffee in little rooms that have stood between masses of ruin; a widow in black weeds, like a dowager duchess, walking slowly down a street shelled last night and to-day; girls with braided hair standing at street corners, among soldiers in steel helmets, watching shells bursting a little way off, with no certainty that that is their limit.
One of these girls came along, and I saw that she had a bandaged head.
"Wounded?" I asked. She nodded and said, "Yes, a day or two ago."
"Why do you stay in such a place?" I said. "Aren't you frightened?"
She laughed. "What can one do? My mamma keeps living here, so how can I go away? Besides, one gets used to it a little."