Chapter 19 - Page 2

fighting on an eight-mile front, had captured the whole line. In two weeks' time, the seven-mile hole was widened to ten. Fortified villages, entrenched redoubts, woods stuffed with guns, great and small, had gone down before that steady, relentless, crushing advance. The full significance of the Somme had not dawned as yet upon the world. The magnitude of the achievement was not yet estimated, but already names hitherto unknown were flung up flaming into the world's sky in letters of eternal fire, Ovillers, Mametz Wood, Trones Wood, Langueval, Mouquet Farm, Deville Wood for the British, with twenty-one thousand prisoners, and Hardecourt, Dompierre, Becquin-Court, Bussu and Fay for the French allies, with thirty-one thousand prisoners.

On that line of carefully chosen and elaborately fortified defences, the proudest of Germany's supermen of war had been beaten at their own game by the civilian soldiers of "effete and luxury loving Britain," and the republican armies of "decadent France," and still the Homeric fight was raging. Foot by foot, yard by yard, the Hun was fighting to hold the line which should make good his insolent claim to the hegemony of the world. Step by step, yard by yard, that line was being torn from his bloody fingers. Into that sea of fire and blood, the Canadians were to plunge. They remembered Langemarck and Sanctuary Wood and St. Eloi, and were not unwilling to make the plunge. They thought of those long months in The Salient, when the ruthless Hun from his vantage ground of overwhelming superiority had poured his deadly hail from right flank, left flank, front and rear, upon them, holding, suffering, dying, day by day, month by month, and they were grimly jubilant over the chance which the Somme offered them of evening somewhat the score.

"We have something to hand Fritzie," young Pickles was heard to remark when he had learned of the quality of the Somme fighting, "and I hope he'll like it, for he's got to take it."

The battalion ranks, both officers and men, had once more been filled up. They had a brief fortnight's training in the new open fighting under barrage and then set off cheerfully for the "Big Game." Ten days they marched and countermarched in the back country, keeping clear of those two mighty streams "up" and "down," that flowed between ditches and hedges along the road that led to the great arena, and catching glimpses and echoes as they marched until, hard, fit, keen, they joined the "upstream" flowing toward Albert. That stream was made up of those various and multifarious elements that go to constitute, equip and maintain a modern army.

There were marching battalions, with their mounted officers, bearing names and insignia famous in the world's wars for two hundred years, and with them battalions who a few brief months ago were peaceful citizens, knowing nothing of war. There were