et the
strategical plan of Sir Douglas Haig and our High Command. The
failure and abandonment of the Nivelle offensive in the Champagne were
disastrous to us. It liberated many German divisions who could be sent
up to relieve exhausted divisions in Flanders. Instead of attacking the
enemy when he was weakening under assaults elsewhere, we attacked him
when all was quiet on the French front. The collapse of Russia was
now happening and our policy ought to have been to save men for the
tremendous moment of 1918, when we should need all our strength. So it
seems certain now, though it is easy to prophesy after the event.

I went along the coast as far as Coxyde and Nieuport and saw secret
preparations for the coast offensive. We were building enormous gun
emplacements at Malo-les--Bains for long-range naval guns, camouflaged
in sand--dunes. Our men were being trained for fighting in the dunes.
Our artillery positions were mapped out.

"Three shots to one, sir," said Sir Henry Rawlinson to the King, "that's
the stuff to give them!"

But the Germans struck the first blow up there, not of importance to the
strategical position, but ghastly to two battalions of the 1st Division,
cut off on a spit of land at Lombartzyde and almost annihilated under a
fury of fire.

At this time the enemy was developing his use of a new
poison-gas--mustard gas--which raised blisters and burned men's bodies
where the vapor was condensed into a reddish powder and blinded them for
a week or more, if not forever, and turned their lungs to water. I saw
hundreds of these cases in the 3rd Canadian casualty clearing station
on the coast, and there were thousands all along our front. At Oast
Dunkerque, near Nieuport, I had a whiff of it, and was conscious of a
burning sensation about the lips and eyelids, and for a week afterward
vomited at times, and was scared by queer flutterings of the heart which
at night seemed to have but a feeble beat. It was enough to "put the
wind up." Our men dreaded the new danger, so mysterious, so stealthy in
its approach. It was one of the new plagues of war.

V

The battle of Flanders began round Ypres on July 31st, with a greater
intensity of artillery on our side than had ever been seen before in
this war in spite of the Somme and Messines, when on big days of battle
two thousand guns opened fire on a single corps front. The enemy was
strong also in artillery arranged in great groups, often shifting to
e