s. We
creep through them, round them, and out to No Man's Land. We are in it now
for good and all.

The enemy is now concentrating his fire on our reserves. He knows that we
have not had sufficient men in the front line trench to be of great effect.
He knows that we can not fit them in there. He knows that the moment we
have cleared the top of the parapet hundreds of men have poured from the
communication trenches into our places. He knows that for miles back men
are massed as thick as they can stand in the reserve trenches. His object
is to destroy our reserves and not the immediate trench in front of him.

We follow the same plan. For, as we advance in short sharp rushes, the
observation officer, who never for a moment relaxes his hold on the
situation, flashes back by telegraph or field telephone the command to the
artillery lying miles away to raise their curtain of fire. They do so, and
shells fall on the German reserves, while we press forward, teeth bared and
cold steel gleaming grayly, to take the front lines. We leap the parapet of
the German trench. We spot our man and bear down on him. We clean out the
dugouts and haul away the cowering officers, and already we are
straightening and strengthening the German trench.

Behind us come wave on wave of our reserves. The second will take the
second trench of the enemy; the third, the third, and so on. Then we
consolidate our position, and Fritz is a sad and sorry boy.

That is the way it should work, but in the early days of the war we used to
find this very difficult. We of the front line would charge and take our
trench. We would get there and not a German to be seen! He would be beating
it down his communication trenches, or what was left of them, as hard as he
could go. We were supposed to stay in the front trench of the enemy. Well,
it was simply against human nature, against the human nature of the First
Canadian boys at any rate. We may have been out there for months and not
had a chance to see a German. And had been wishing and waiting for this
very opportunity. We would see Fritz disappear round a traverse and we
simply could not stand still and let him go, or let the other fellow get
him. We were bound to go after him. This was really our traditional
weakness. Often-times we went too far in our eagerness to capture the Hun,
and were unable to hold all that we got.

In the early days, too, we charged in open formation. Certainly we lost, in
the first in