eceived was to hang on.

This we proceeded to do, and so, we are told, did the others. We
learned later that the battalion roll call that night showed a
strength of one hundred and fifty men out of the six hundred and
thirty-five who had answered "Present" twenty-four hours earlier. And
the official records of the Canadian Eye Witness, Lord Beaverbrook,
then Sir Max Aitken, as given in "Canada in Flanders," state that
"Those who survive and the friends of those who have died may draw
solace from the thought that never in the history of arms have
soldiers more valiantly sustained the gift and trust of a Lady,"
referring to the Color which had been worked for and presented to us
by the Princess Patricia, daughter of His Royal Highness the Duke of
Connaught, then Governor-General of Canada.

We were on the apex of the line and were now unsupported on either
side. It was about this time, I believe, that a small detachment of
the King's Shropshire Light Infantry, a sister regiment in our
brigade, fetched to the companies in our rear twenty boxes of badly
needed ammunition and reenforced the Princess Patricias.

Following the beating off of their infantry attack the Germans gave us
a short breathing spell until their machine guns had been trained on
our parapet and a school of light field guns dragged up into place.
The aeroplane came out again, dropping to within three hundred feet of
our trench, and with tiny jets of vari-colored smoke bombs, directed
the terribly accurate fire of the enemy guns, already so close to, but
so well insured against any harm from us that they attempted no
concealment. And the big guns on the right completed the devastation.

This continued for another half hour, at the end of which time there
remained intact only one small traverse in the trench, which owed its
existence to the fragment of chicken wire that held its sides up. The
remainder was absolutely wiped out. This time there was no rapid fire,
nor even any looking over the top to see if the enemy were coming on.
Instead, the Germans fairly combed the parapet with their machine
guns. Each indication of curiosity from us drew forth from them such a
stream of fire that the top of the parapet spat forth a steady shower
of flying mud, and, which made it impossible for us to defend
ourselves properly, even had there been enough of us left to do so.

The rest was chaos, a bit of pure hell. Men struggling, buried alive
and looking at us for t