ending a night in the guard-room (there were shouts of
laughter at this), he drank his sip of neat whisky, according to the
custom of the day.

"Toodle-oo, old bird!" said a kilted cockney, halfway up a ladder, on
which he swayed perilously, being very drunk; but the colonel did not
hear this familiar way of address.

In many billets and in many halls the feast of New Year's day was kept
in good comradeship by men who had faced death together, and who in the
year that was coming fought in many battles and fell on many fields.

VII

The Canadians who were in the Ypres salient in January, 1916, and for
a long time afterward, had a grim way of fighting. The enemy never
knew what they might do next. When they were most quiet they were
most dangerous. They used cunning as well as courage, and went out
on red-Indian adventures over No Man's Land for fierce and scientific
slaughter.

I remember one of their early raids in the salient, when a big party of
them--all volunteers--went out one night with intent to get through the
barbed wire outside a strong German position, to do a lot of killing
there. They had trained for the job and thought out every detail of this
hunting expedition. They blacked their faces so that they would not show
white in the enemy's flares. They fastened flash-lamps to their bayonets
so that they might see their victims. They wore rubber gloves to save
their hands from being torn on the barbs of the wire.

Stealthily they crawled over No Man's Land, crouching in shell-holes
every time a rocket rose and made a glimmer of light. They took their
time at the wire, muffling the snap of it by bits of cloth. Reliefs
crawled up with more gloves, and even with tins of hot cocoa. Then
through the gap into the German trenches, and there were screams of
German soldiers, terror-shaken by the flash of light in their eyes,
and black faces above them, and bayonets already red with blood. It
was butcher's work, quick and skilful, like red-Indian scalping. Thirty
Germans were killed before the Canadians went back, with only two
casualties... The Germans were horrified by this sudden slaughter. They
dared not come out on patrol work. Canadian scouts crawled down to them
and insulted them, ingeniously, vilely, but could get no answer. Later
they trained their machine--guns on German working-parties and swept
crossroads on which supplies came up, and the Canadian sniper, in one
shell-hole or another, lay for