opportunity to charge into the Allied front. The charge was not long
delayed. A gray wave poured over the parapet of the German first line
trench, rolled through the prepared openings in their own barbed-wire
entanglements, and advanced, alternately running and creeping, toward
the Allied line. But when the Germans were once in the open a terrible
thing happened to them. The machine guns from all along the British
trenches met them with a rain of bullets that mowed them down as grain
falls to the blades of the farmer's reaper. The rifles of the men in
khaki, resting on the benches of the parapet, spit constant and deadly
fire at them. The artillery to the rear, in constant telephone touch
with the first line, quickly found the range and dropped shells into
the charging mass with terrible effect. A second body of gray-clad
soldiers with fixed bayonets swarmed out of the German trenches and
came to the help of their hard-beset comrades, and met a similar fate.
Then a third platoon came on, and a fourth. The resources of the enemy
in men seemed endless, their persistence remarkable, their
recklessness in the face of sure death almost unbelievable. The noise
was terrific; the constant rattle of the machine guns, the spitting of
rifles, the booming of the artillery, the whining and crashing of
shells, the yells of the charging troops, the shrieks of the wounded.
In the British trenches the men were assembled, ready to pour out at
the whistle and repel the assault on open ground; but it was not
necessary for them to do so. The German ranks, unable to withstand the
fire that devoured them as they met it, a fire that it was humanly
impossible for any troops to withstand, turned back and sought the
shelter of their trenches, leaving their dead and wounded piled and
sprawled by the hundreds on the ground they had failed to cross.

The casualties among the Canadian troops were not large, and they had
occurred mostly before the charge had been launched, but it was in
deep sorrow that the men from across the ocean gathered up from the
shattered trenches the pierced and broken bodies of their comrades,
and sent them to the rear, the living to be cared for in the
hospitals, the dead to be buried on the soil of France where they had
bravely fought and nobly died.

CHAPTER XII

The great Somme drive began on July 1, 1916, after a week's
devastating bombardment of the German lines. The enemy trenches had
been torn and shatte