Chapter 19

THE PILOT'S LAST PORT



The little Canadian army was done with The Salient. The British tradition established in the third month of the war, in that first terrific twenty-two days' fight by Ypres, that that deadly convex should be no thoroughfare to Calais for the Hun, was passed on with The Salient into Canadian hands in the early months of 1915. How the little Canadian army preserved the tradition and barred "the road-hog of Europe" from the channel coast for seventeen months, let history tell, and at what cost let the dead declare who lie in unmarked graves which, following the curving line of trenches from Langemarck through Hooge and Sanctuary Wood over Observation Ridge to St. Eloi, and the dead under those little crosses that crowd the cemeteries of The Salient and of the clearing stations in the rear, and the living as well, who through life will carry the burden of enfeebled and mutilated bodies.

For seventeen months the Canadians in shallow dugouts and behind flimsy trenches endured the maddening pounding of the Huns' guns, big and little, without the satisfaction of reprisal, except in raid or counter-attack, suffering the loss of two-thirds of their entire force, but still holding. Now at length came the welcome release. They were ordered to the Somme. Welcome not simply because of escape from an experience the most trying to which an army could be subjected, but welcome chiefly because there was a chance of fighting back.

They had no illusions about that great battle area of the south, echoes of whose titanic struggle had reached them, but they longed for a chance to get back at their foe. Besides, the Somme challenged their fighting spirit. That glorious assault of the first of July of the allied armies which flung them upon the scientifically prepared, embattled and entrenched "German Frontier," with its fortified villages, its gun stuffed woods, its massed parks of artillery, and defended by highly disciplined and superbly organised soldiery, stirred them like a bugle call. For two years the master war-makers of the world had employed scientific knowledge, ingenuity and unlimited resources upon the construction of a system of defence by means of which they hoped to defy the world, and upon which when completed they displayed the vaunting challenge, "We are ready for you; come on!"

In that great conflict there was no element of surprise. It was a deliberate testing out of strength, physical and moral. For the first time in the war the British army stood upon something like even terms in manpower and in weight of metal, with, however, the immense handicap still resting upon it that it was the attacking force. The result settled forever the question of the fighting quality of the races. When the first day's fight was done, on a battle front of twenty miles the British armies had smashed a hole seven miles wide, while their gallant allies,