r the Lusitania was sunk, when my own
feelings had lost all semblance of neutrality.

The Canadians enlivened life at the front; for they have a little more
zip to them than the thorough-going British. Their climate spells
"hustle," and we are all the product of climate to a large degree,
whether in England, on the Mississippi flatlands, or in Manitoba.
Eager and high-strung the Canadian born, quick to see and to act.
Very restless they were when held up on Salisbury Plain, after they
had come three-four-five-six thousand miles to fight and there was
nothing to fight but mud in an English winter.

One from the American contingent knew what ailed them; they
wanted action. They may have seemed undisciplined to a drill
sergeant; but the kind of discipline they needed was a sight of the real
thing. They wanted to know, What for? And Lord Kitchener was
kinder to them, though many were beginners, than to his own new
army; he could be, as they were ready with guns and equipment. So
he sent them over to France before it was too late in the spring to get
frozen feet from standing in icy water looking over a parapet at a
German parapet. They liked Flanders mud better than Salisbury Plain
mud, because it meant that there was "something doing."

It was in their first trenches that I saw them, and they were "on the
job, all right," in face of scattered shell-fire and the sweep of
searchlights and flares. They had become the most ardent of pupils,
for here was that real thing which steadied them and proved their
metal.

They refashioned their trenches and drained them with the
fastidiousness of good housekeepers who had a frontiersman's
experience for an inheritance. In a week they appeared to be old
hands at the business.

"Their discipline is different from ours," said a British general, "but it
works out. They are splendid. I ask for no better troops."

They may have lacked the etiquette of discipline of British regulars,
but they had the natural discipline of self-reliance and of "go to it"
when a crisis came. This trench was only an introduction, a
preparation for a thing which was about as real as ever fell to the lot
of any soldiers. It is not for me to tell here the story of their part in
the second battle of Ypres, when the gas fumes rolled in upon them.
I should like to tell it and also the story of the deeds of many British
regiments, from the time of Mons to Festubert. All Canada knows it in
detail from their own