ll share of
losses. The truth is that if any normal man was stuck in the mud of the
Ypres salient and another wanted his place he would say, "Take it! I'm
only trying to get out! We've got equally bad morasses in the Upper
Yukon;" and retire to a hill and set up a machine gun.

When a Canadian officer was asked if he had organized some trenches that
his battalion had taken his reply, "How can you organize pea soup?"
filled a long-felt want in expression to characterize the nature of
trench-making in that kind of terrain. Yet in that sea of slimy and
infected mush men have fought for the possession of cubic feet of the
mixture as if it had the qualities of Balm of Gilead--which was also
logical. What appears most illogical to the outsider is sometimes most
logical in war. It was a fight for mastery, and mastery is the first
step in a war of frontal positions.

Many lessons the Canadians had to learn about organization and staff
work, about details of discipline which make for homogeneity of action,
and the divisions that came to join the first one learned their lessons
in the Ypres salient school, which gave hard but lasting tuition. I was
away when at St. Eloi they were put to such tests as only the salient
can provide. The time was winter, when chill water filled the
shell-craters and the soil oozed out of sandbags and the mist was a
cold, wet poultice. Men bred to a dry climate had to fight in a climate
better suited to the Englishman or the German than to the Canadian.
There could be no dugouts. Lift a spade of earth below the earth level
and it became a puddle. It was a wrestling fight in the mud, this,
holding onto shell-craters and the soft remains of trenches. The Germans
had heard that the Canadians were highstrung, nervous, quick for the
offensive, but badly organized and poor at sticking. The Canadians
proved that they could be stubborn and that their soldiers, even if they
had not had the directing system of an army staff that had prepared for
forty years, with two years of experience could act on their own in
resisting as well as in attacking. "Our men! our men!" the officers
would say. That was it: Canada's men, learning tactics in face of German
tactics and holding their own!

When all was peaceable up and down the line, with the Grand Offensive a
month away, the Germans once more "tried it on" the Canadians in the
Hooge and Mount Sorrell sector, where the positions were all in favor of
the Germans with