Chapter 14

A TOUCH OF WAR



The period of intensive training was drawing to a close. The finishing touches in the various departments that had come to be considered necessary in modern warfare had been given. With the "putting on the lacquer" the fighting spirit of the men had been sharpened to its keenest edge. They were all waiting impatiently for the order to "go up." The motives underlying that ardour of spirit varied with the temperament, disposition and education of the soldier. There were those who were eager to "go up" to prove themselves in that deadly struggle where their fellow Canadians had already won their right to stand as comrades in arms with the most famous fighting battalions of the British army. Others, again, there were in whose heart burned a deep passion to get into grips with those hellish fiends whose cruelties, practised upon defenceless women and children in that very district where they were camped, and upon wounded Canadians, had stirred Canada from Vancouver to Halifax with a desire for revenge.

But, with the great majority there was little of the desire either for military glory or for revenge. Their country had laid upon them a duty for the discharge of which they had been preparing themselves for many months, and that duty they were ready to perform. More than that, they were eager to get at it and get done with it, no matter at what cost. With all this, too, there was an underlying curiosity as to what the thing would be like "up there." Far down below all their feelings there lay an unanswered interrogation which no man dared to put to his comrade, and which indeed few men put to themselves. That interrogation was: "How shall I stand up under the test?"

The camp was overrun with rumours from returning battalions of the appalling horrors of the front line. Ever since that fateful 22nd of April, 1915, that day of tragedy and of glory for the Canadian army, and for the Canadian people, the Ypres salient, the point of honour on the western front from Dixmude to Verdun, had been given into the keeping of the Canadian army. During those long and terrible months, in the face of a continued bombardment and of successive counter-attacks, with the line growing thinner, week by week, hacked up by woefully inadequate artillery, the Canadian army had held on with the grim tenacity of death itself. There was nothing that they could do but hold on. To push the salient deeper into the enemy lines would only emphasise the difficulty and danger of their position. The role assigned them was that of simply holding steady with what ultimate objective in view no one seemed to know.

Week by week, and month after month, the Canadian battalions had moved up into the salient, had done their "tours," building up their obliterated parapets, digging out their choked-up water-courses, revetting their crumbling trenches, and