Then it was that our Captain told us bluntly that we were obviously outnumbered by the Germans, ten to one. Then he told us that, practically speaking, we had scarcely the ghost of a chance, but that a bluff might succeed. He told us to "swing the lead over them". This we did by yelling, hooting, shouting, clamouring, until it seemed, and the enemy believed, that we were ten to their one.
The ruse succeeded. At daybreak, when we rested, we found that we had driven the enemy back almost to his original position. All night long we had been fighting with our backs to our comrades who were in the front trenches. The enemy had got behind us and we had had to face about in what served for trenches. By dawn we had him back again in his original position, and we were facing in the old direction. By dawn we had almost, though not quite, forced a junction with the British right.
The night of April the twenty-second is one that I can never forget. It was frightful, yes. Yet there was a grandeur in the appalling intensity of living, in the appalling intensity of death as it surrounded us.
The German shells rose and burst behind us. They made the Yser Canal a stream of molten glory. Shells fell in the city, and split the darkness of the heavens in the early night hours. Later, the moon rose in the splendour of springtime. Straight behind the tower of the great cathedral it rose and shone down on a bloody earth.
Suddenly the grand old Cloth Hall burst into flames. The spikes of fire rose and fell and rose again. Showers of sparks went upward. A pall of smoke would form and cloud the moon, waver, break, and pass. There was the mutter and rumble and roar of great guns. . . .
It was glorious. It was terrible. It was inspiring. Through an inferno of destruction and death . . . we lived because we must.
Perhaps our greatest reward came when on April twenty-sixth the English troops reached us. We had been completely cut off by the enemy barrage from all communication with other sectors of the line. Still, through the wounded gone back, word of our stand had drifted out. The English boys fought and force-marched and fought again their terrible way through the barrage to our aid, and when they arrived, weary and worn and torn, cutting their bloody way to us, they cheered themselves hoarse; cheered as they marched along, cheered and gripped our hands as they got within touch of us. Yell after yell went upward, and stirring words woke the echoes. The boys of the Old Country paid their greatest tribute to us of the New as they cried:
"Canadians—Canadians—that's all!"
Harold R. Peat
From "Private Peat"—Copyright, 1917. Used by special permission of the Publishers, The Bobbs-Merrill Company