ffered also, so that the
battlefield was one great shambles. Our own wounded, who were brought
back, owe their lives to the stretcher-bearers, who were supreme in
devotion. They worked in and out across that shell-swept ground hour
after hour through the day and night, rescuing many stricken men at a
great cost in life to themselves. Out of one party of twenty only five
remained alive. "No one can say," said one of their officers, "that the
Canadians do not know how to die."

No one would deny that.

Out of three thousand men in the Canadian 8th Brigade their casualties
were twenty-two hundred.

There were 151 survivors from the 1st Battalion Canadian Mounted Rifles,
130 from the 4th Battalion, 350 from the 5th, 520 from the 2nd. Those
are the figures of massacre.

Eleven days later the Canadians took their revenge. Their own guns were
but a small part of the huge orchestra of "heavies" and field batteries
which played the devil's tattoo upon the German positions in our old
trenches. It was annihilating, and the German soldiers had to endure the
same experience as their guns had given to Canadian troops on the same
ground. Trenches already battered were smashed again. The earth, which
was plowed with shells in their own attack, was flung up again by our
shells. It was hell again for poor human wretches.

The Canadian troops charged at two o'clock in the morning. Their attack
was directed to the part of the line from the southern end of Sanctuary
Wood to Mount Gorst, about a mile, which included Armagh Wood,
Observatory Hill, and Mount Gorst itself.

The attack went quickly and the men expected greater trouble. The
enemy's shell-fire was heavy, but the Canadians got through under
cover of their own guns, which had lengthened their fuses a little and
continued an intense bombardment behind the enemy's first line. The men
advanced in open order and worked downward and southward into their old
positions.

In one place of attack about forty Germans, who fought desperately, were
killed almost to a man, just as Colonel Shaw had died on June 2d with
his party of eighty men who had rallied round him. It was one shambles
for another, and the Germans were not less brave, it seems.

One officer and one hundred and thirteen men surrendered. The officer
was glad to escape from the death to which he had resigned himself when
our bombardment began.

"I knew how it would be," he said. "We had orders to take this ground,
and