CHAPTER XIX
THE PILOT'S LAST PORT
The little Canadian army was done with The Salient. The British tradition established in the third month of the war, in that first terrific twenty-two days' fight by Ypres, that that deadly convex should be no thoroughfare to Calais for the Hun, was passed on with The Salient into Canadian hands in the early months of 1915. How the little Canadian army preserved the tradition and barred “the road-hog of Europe” from the channel coast for seventeen months, let history tell, and at what cost let the dead declare who lie in unmarked graves which, following the curving line of trenches from Langemarck through Hooge and Sanctuary Wood over Observation Ridge to St. Eloi, and the dead under those little crosses that crowd the cemeteries of The Salient and of the clearing stations in the rear, and the living as well, who through life will carry the burden of enfeebled and mutilated bodies.
For seventeen months the Canadians in shallow dugouts and behind flimsy trenches endured the maddening pounding of the Huns' guns, big and little, without the satisfaction of reprisal, except in raid or counter-attack, suffering the loss of two-thirds of their entire force, but still holding. Now at length came the welcome release. They were ordered to the Somme. Welcome not simply because of escape from an experience the most trying to which an army could be subjected, but welcome chiefly because there was a chance of fighting back.
They had no illusions about that great battle area of the south, echoes of whose titanic struggle had reached them, but they longed for a chance to get back at their foe. Besides, the Somme challenged their fighting spirit. That glorious assault of the first of July of the allied armies which flung them upon the scientifically prepared, embattled and entrenched “German Frontier,” with its fortified villages, its gun stuffed woods, its massed parks of artillery, and defended by highly disciplined and superbly organised soldiery, stirred them like a bugle call. For two years the master war-makers of the world had employed scientific knowledge, ingenuity and unlimited resources upon the construction of a system of defence by means of which they hoped to defy the world, and upon which when completed they displayed the vaunting challenge, “We are ready for you; come on!”
In that great conflict there was no element of surprise. It was a deliberate testing out of strength, physical and moral. For the first time in the war the British army stood upon something like even terms in manpower and in weight of metal, with, however, the immense handicap still resting upon it that it was the attacking force. The result settled forever the question of the fighting quality of the races. When the first day's fight was done, on a battle front of twenty miles the British armies had smashed a hole seven miles wide, while their gallant allies, fighting on an eight-mile front, had captured the whole line. In two weeks' time, the seven-mile hole was widened to ten. Fortified villages, entrenched redoubts, woods stuffed with guns, great and small, had gone down before that steady, relentless, crushing advance. The full significance of the Somme had not dawned as yet upon the world. The magnitude of the achievement was not yet estimated, but already names hitherto unknown were flung up flaming into the world's sky in letters of eternal fire, Ovillers, Mametz Wood, Trones Wood, Langueval, Mouquet Farm, Deville Wood for the British, with twenty-one thousand prisoners, and Hardecourt, Dompierre, Becquin-Court, Bussu and Fay for the French allies, with thirty-one thousand prisoners.
On that line of carefully chosen and elaborately fortified defences, the proudest of Germany's supermen of war had been beaten at their own game by the civilian soldiers of “effete and luxury loving Britain,” and the republican armies of “decadent France,” and still the Homeric fight was raging. Foot by foot, yard by yard, the Hun was fighting to hold the line which should make good his insolent claim to the hegemony of the world. Step by step, yard by yard, that line was being torn from his bloody fingers. Into that sea of fire and blood, the Canadians were to plunge. They remembered Langemarck and Sanctuary Wood and St. Eloi, and were not unwilling to make the plunge. They thought of those long months in The Salient, when the ruthless Hun from his vantage ground of overwhelming superiority had poured his deadly hail from right flank, left flank, front and rear, upon them, holding, suffering, dying, day by day, month by month, and they were grimly jubilant over the chance which the Somme offered them of evening somewhat the score.
“We have something to hand Fritzie,” young Pickles was heard to remark when he had learned of the quality of the Somme fighting, “and I hope he'll like it, for he's got to take it.”
The battalion ranks, both officers and men, had once more been filled up. They had a brief fortnight's training in the new open fighting under barrage and then set off cheerfully for the “Big Game.” Ten days they marched and countermarched in the back country, keeping clear of those two mighty streams “up” and “down,” that flowed between ditches and hedges along the road that led to the great arena, and catching glimpses and echoes as they marched until, hard, fit, keen, they joined the “upstream” flowing toward Albert. That stream was made up of those various and multifarious elements that go to constitute, equip and maintain a modern army.
There were marching battalions, with their mounted officers, bearing names and insignia famous in the world's wars for two hundred years, and with them battalions who a few brief months ago were peaceful citizens, knowing nothing of war. There were transport columns, ammunition columns, artillery columns, with mounted escorts. There were big guns, on huge caterpillar trucks, shouldering the lighter traffic to the ditches, and little guns slipping meekly in their rear. There were motor lorries, honking and thundering their insistent way through dodging, escaping, cursing infantry, forty-six miles of them to a single army corps. There were strings of mules and horses with weirdly shaped burdens on their pack saddles. There were motor cars bearing “Brass Hats,” gentle looking individuals, excessively polite, yet somehow getting men to jump when they spoke, and everywhere ambulances, silent and swift moving, before whose approach the stream parted in recognition of the right of way of these messengers of mercy over all the enginery of war.