Emperor's own troops with their master's
eye on them, on November 11th, when the First Division in General
Haig's First Corps, checked them, enfiladed them, mowed them down,
till the flower of the Imperial troops fell back in defeat, never
knowing by how small a fraction they had missed victory, how thin a
line had held them, how little stood between them and the ports that
fed the British Army. Here on these flats to my right were Lord
Cavan's Guards, and on either side of him General Allenby's cavalry,
and General Byng's; while, if one turns to the north towards the
distance which hides Sonnebeke and Bixschoote, one is looking over the
ground so magnificently held on our extreme left by General Dubois and
his 9th French Corps.

Guards, Yorkshires, Lancashires, London Scottish, Worcesters, Royal
Scots Fusiliers, Highlanders, Gordons, Leicesters--all the familiar
names of the old Army are likend with this great story. It was an
English and Scotch victory, the victory of these Islands, won before
the "rally of the Empire" had time to develop, before a single
Canadian or Australian soldier had landed in France.

But that is only the first, though in some ways the greatest, chapter
in this bloodstained book. Memory runs on nearly six months, and we
come to that awful April afternoon, when the French line broke under
the first German gas attack, and the Canadians on their right held on
through two days and nights, gassed and shelled, suffering frightful
casualties, but never yielding, till the line was safe, and fresh
troops had come up. It was not six weeks since at Neuve Chapelle the
Canadians had for the first time, while not called on to take much
active part themselves, seen the realities of European battle; and the
cheers of the British troops at Ypres as the exhausted Dominion troops
came back from the trenches will live in history.

Messines, and the victory of June, 1917--Passchendaele, and the losses
of that grim winter--all the points indeed of this dim horizon from
north-west to south-east have their imperishable meaning for Great
Britain and the Dominions. For quite apart from the main actions which
stand out, fighting and death never ceased in the Ypres salient.

Then, as the great Army of the gallant dead seemed to gather round one
on this famous road, and over these shell-torn flats, a sudden
recollection of a letter which I received in August, 1918, brought a
tightening of the throat. A Canadian lady,