IN.]

CHAPTER VII

INTERIM

For a time there was little news from the Canadians at the front, for
they were not immediately placed in the trenches. Trench warfare was
then still a novelty; its exact principles had not been developed, and
all the training done on the Plain had been the ordinary open style of
fighting--quite useless against the strongly entrenched positions the
Germans had taken up.

So while lying in reserve behind the lines the First Division dug and
manned trenches and practised themselves in the new warfare. Selected
officers from each company spent days in the front line with other
battalions and returned to their men bristling with information.

A little later selected platoons and companies took their turn in the
front line, and before the end of February the Canadian Division was
holding its own sector of the British line.

Casualties began to drift back to the Canadian base, which had now
become centred at Shorncliffe, and letters began to arrive with details
of the new methods of fighting. There was other news, too, of a more
cheerful sort that showed brighter glimpses of life that occurred when
enjoying brief rests from the firing line.

"Don't sympathise with us too much," wrote one officer; "we would sooner
be here than on the Plain. Last night we gave an oyster and champagne
supper at ---- to three Ottawa ladies who are running a soup and coffee
waggon for our battalion. We had a great time. D---- Dang and the Cat
(another subaltern) were in fine fettle."

But more serious work was in view.

On March 10th the British commenced an offensive at Neuve Chapelle
which, had it proved successful, would have involved the Canadians in
the projected advance upon the Aubers Ridge, which formed the key to
Lille.

But Neuve Chapelle, although a victory in one sense of the word, was a
very costly lesson, but a lesson that showed that our artillery must be
enormously increased if any further effort to break through the German
line was to be made.

For, having taken their objective, the British troops found not only a
second but a third line of trenches protected by entanglements of a most
formidable nature, and so situated as to render the ground recently won
at such heavy cost almost untenable. To carry these lines would require
another bombardment more intense even than that which had preceded the
attack. Our line had advanced one mile and there it stayed.

So ended the first atte