ns were at home. You
rejoiced with this battalion. Victory is sweet.

When on the way back to quarters you passed some of the new army
men, "the Keetcheenaires," as the French call them, you were
reminded that although the war was old the British army was young.
There was a "Watch our city grow!" atmosphere about it. Little by
little, some great force seemed steadily pushing up from the rear. It
made that business institution at G.H.Q. feel like bankers with an
enormous, increasing surplus. In this the British is like no other army.
One has watched it in the making.

XXIV
The Maple Leaf Folk

These were "home folks" to the American. You might know all by their
maple-leaf symbol; but even before you saw that, with its bronze
none too prominent against the khaki, you knew those who were not
recent emigrants from England to Canada by their accent and by
certain slang phrases which pay no customs duty at the border.

When, on a dark February night cruising in a slough of a road, I heard
out of a wall of blackness back of the trenches, "Gee! Get on to the
bus!" which referred to our car, and also, "Cut out the noise!" I was
certain that I might dispense with an interpreter. After I had remarked
that I came from New York, which is only across the street from
Montreal as distances go in our countries, the American batting about
the front at midnight was welcomed with a "glad hand" across that
imaginary line which has and ever shall have no fortresses.

What a strange place to find Canadians--at the front in Europe! I
could never quite accommodate myself to the wonder of a man from
Winnipeg, and perhaps a "neutral" from Wyoming in his company,
fighting Germans in Flanders. A man used to a downy couch and an
easy chair by the fire and steam-heated rooms, who had ten
thousand a year in Toronto, when you found him in a chill, damp
cellar of a peasant's cottage in range of the enemy's shells was
getting something more than novel, if not more picturesque, than
dog-mushing and prospecting on the Yukon; for we are quite used to
that contrast.

All I asked of the Canadians was to allow a little of the glory they had
won--they had such a lot--to rub off on their neighbours. If there must
be war, and no Canadian believed in it as an institution, why, to my
mind, the Canadians did a fine thing for civilization's sake. It hurt
sometimes to think that we also could not be in the fight for the good
cause, particularly afte