shed ahead with vigor, under the direction, for the
first three years, of the Minister of Militia, General Sir Sam Hughes.
Many mistakes were made. Complaints of waste in supply departments
and of slackness of discipline among the troops were rife in the early
months. But the work went on; and when the testing time came, Canada's
civilian soldiers held their own with any veterans on either side the
long line of trenches.

It was in April, 1915, at the second battle of Ypres--or, as it is more
often termed in Canada, St. Julien or Langemarck--that the quality of
the men of the first contingent was blazoned forth. The Germans had
launched a determined attack on the junction of the French and Canadian
forces, seeking to drive through to Calais. The use, for the first time,
of asphyxiating gases drove back in confusion the French colonial troops
on the left of the Canadians. Attacked and outflanked by a German army
of 150,000 men, four Canadian brigades, immensely inferior in heavy
artillery and tortured by the poisonous fumes, filled the gap, hanging
on doggedly day and night until reenforcements came and Calais was
saved. In sober retrospection it was almost incredible that the thin
khaki line had held against the overwhelming odds which faced it. A few
weeks later, at Givenchy and Festubert, in the same bloody salient of
Ypres, the Canadian division displayed equal courage with hardly equal
success. In the spring of 1916, when the Canadian forces grew first to
three and then to four divisions, heavy toll was taken at St. Eloi and
Sanctuary Wood.

When they were shifted from the Ypres sector to the Somme, the dashing
success at Courcelette showed them as efficient in offense as in
defense. In 1917 a Canadian general, Sir Arthur Currie, three years
before only a business man of Vancouver, took command of the Canadian
troops. The capture of Vimy Ridge, key to the whole Arras position,
after months of careful preparation, the hard-fought struggle for Lens,
and toward the close of the year the winning of the Passchendaele Ridge,
at heavy cost, were instances of the increasing scale and importance of
the operations entrusted to Currie's men.

In the closing year of the war the Canadian corps played a still more
distinctive and essential part. During the early months of 1918, when
the Germans were making their desperate thrusts for Paris and the
Channel, the Canadians held little of the line that was attacked.
Their division