o fight it
out among themselves under a curtain of fire; and their relatives ought
to feel a deep relief after the excursion steamers that came from
Toronto, Cleveland and Buffalo to see the show had returned home.

To listen to certain narrators you might think that it was the Allies
who always got the worst of it in the Ypres salient, but the German did
not like the salient any better than they. I never met anybody who did
like it. German prisoners said that German soldiers regarded it as a
sentence of death to be sent to the salient. There are many kinds of mud
and then there is Ypres salient mud, which is all kinds together with a
Belgian admixture. I sometimes thought that the hellish outbreaks by
both sides in this region were due to the reason which might have made
Job run amuck if all the temper he had stored up should have broken out
in a storm.

This is certain, that the Canadians took their share in the buffets in
the mud, not through any staff calculation but partly through German
favoritism and the workings of German psychology. Consider that the
first volunteer troops to be put in the battle line in France weeks
before any of Kitchener's Army was the first Canadian division, in
answer to its own request for action, which is sufficient soldierly
tribute of a commander to Canadian valor! That proud first division,
after it had been well mud-soaked and had its hand in, was caught in
the gas attack. It refused to yield when it was only human to yield, and
stood resolute in the fumes between the Germans and success and even
counter-attacked. Moreover, it was Canadians who introduced the trench
raid.

If the Canadians did not particularly love the Germans, do you see any
reason why the Germans should love the Canadians? It was unpleasant to
suffer repulse by troops from an unmilitary, new country. Besides,
German psychology reasoned that if Canadians at the front were made to
suffer heavy losses the men at home would be discouraged from enlisting.
Why not? What had Canada to gain by coming to fight in France? It does
not appear an illogical hypothesis until you know the Canadians.

However, it must not be understood that other battalions, brigades and
divisions, English and Scotch, did not suffer as heavily as the
Canadians. They did; and do not forget that in the area which has seen
the hardest, bloodiest, meanest, nastiest, ghastliest fighting in the
history of the world the Germans, too, have had their fu