.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 47269
   :PG.Title: Over the Canadian Battlefields
   :PG.Released: 2014-11-07
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: John \W. Dafoe
   :DC.Title: Over the Canadian Battlefields
              Notes of a Little Journey in France, in March, 1919
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1919
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

==============================
OVER THE CANADIAN BATTLEFIELDS
==============================

.. clearpage::

.. pgheader::

.. container:: frontispiece

   .. vspace:: 4

   .. _`A Landmark of the Canadian Battlefields`:

   .. figure:: images/img-front.jpg
      :figclass: white-space-pre-line
      :align: center
      :alt: A Landmark of the Canadian Battlefields

      A Landmark of the Canadian Battlefields

   These ruined towers of the Church and
   Monastery of Mont St. Eloi—relics of the revolutionary
   wars of France—overlook the Battlefields
   of Vimy Ridge and Arras, and were a familiar
   landmark to tens of thousands of Canadian
   soldiers during the war.

   .. vspace:: 4

.. container:: titlepage center white-space-pre-line

   .. class:: xx-large bold

      Over the
      Canadian Battlefields

   .. class:: medium bold

      *Notes of a Little Journey in France,
      in March, 1919*

   .. vspace:: 2

   .. class:: medium

      By

   .. class:: large

      JOHN W. DAFOE

   .. vspace:: 3

   .. class:: medium

      THOMAS ALLEN
      TORONTO

   .. vspace:: 4

.. container:: verso center white-space-pre-line

   .. class:: small

      COPYRIGHT, CANADA, 1919
      BY THOMAS ALLEN, TORONTO

   .. vspace:: 3

   .. class:: small

      PRINTED IN CANADA

   .. vspace:: 4

.. container:: dedication center white-space-pre-line

   .. _`Dedication`:

   .. class:: medium

      TO
      GENERAL SIR ARTHUR CURRIE, G.C.M.G., K.C.B.,
      THE CIVILIAN COMMANDER OF THE
      CONQUERING CANADIAN CIVILIAN ARMY
      THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
      BY THE AUTHOR
      IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF
      COURTESIES EXTENDED TO HIM.

   .. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center large bold

.. _`Author's Foreword`:

   AUTHOR'S FOREWORD

.. vspace:: 1

The articles which go to make up this
little book were written for
newspaper publication immediately
following the journey over the battlefields, in
France in March, 1919, which I had been
enabled to make, through the courtesy and
kindness of the Canadian Corps
Commander.  They were published in April, 1919,
in the Manitoba *Free Press*, Winnipeg; and
are now republished at the request of many
friends who have asked that they be made
available in more permanent form.

Though the articles reveal their journalistic
origin alike in their form and in a
certain evanescent timeliness, already
partly out of date, it has not been considered
advisable, under the circumstances, to re-cast
them into more permanent form.  They are
re-published as written save for some slight
textual corrections.

.. vspace:: 1

.. class:: noindent

   \J.\W.\D.

.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center large bold

   CONTENTS

.. vspace:: 2

.. class:: noindent

`A Landmark of the Canadian Battlefields`_ . . . *Frontispiece*

.. class:: noindent

`Dedication`_

.. class:: noindent

`Author's Foreword`_

.. class:: noindent white-space-pre-line

Chapter I.  `A Hurried Pilgrimage`_
Chapter II.  `The Battlegrounds of the Souchez`_
Chapter III.  `The Abomination of Desolation`_
Chapter IV.  `The Marks of War`_
Chapter V.  `The Canadian Hammer Strokes`_
Chapter VI.  `The Civilian as Warrior`_
Chapter VII.  `Compensations`_

.. vspace:: 4

.. _`A HURRIED PILGRIMAGE`:

.. class:: center x-large bold white-space-pre-line

   OVER THE
   CANADIAN BATTLEFIELDS

.. class:: center medium bold

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER I

.. class:: center medium bold

   A HURRIED PILGRIMAGE

.. vspace:: 2

In the first days of March, 1919, I made
hurriedly a pilgrimage that will be made
in more leisurely manner by thousands of
Canadians in coming years.  For while the
memory of the Great War endures and
Canada retains her national consciousness,
Canadians, generation after generation for
centuries to come, will follow the Canadian
way of glory over the battlefields of France
and Flanders, with reverent hearts and
shining eyes, learning anew the story of
what will doubtless always remain the most
romantic page in our national history.  For
lack of time I had to forego my visit to the
bitter battlefields of Flanders: Ypres,
where the Canadians held the line against
all odds when German hopes for the
Channel ports appeared for the moment to be on
the point of fulfilment; Festubert, St. Eloi
and Sanctuary Wood, the scenes of desperate
encounters where the Canadians learned
hard lessons in the art of beating the Boche;
and Passchendaele, where the very doubtful
and questionable Flanders campaign of
1917 had a victorious finale by the
resounding achievement of the Canadian corps in
capturing the ridge which had so long
defied assault.  But the other Canadian
battle-fronts I saw, albeit hurriedly and under
weather conditions which were far from
propitious; and perhaps some notes of my
impressions may not be entirely lacking in
interest to the Canadian public.

But before going on to this something
might be said on the general subject of
visits to the Canadian battlefields of the
western European front.  At the moment
of course this area is sealed to visitors.  It
constitutes a military zone which can only
be entered under the authority of a "white
pass."  Unless one is accompanied by a
member of the military staff he cannot get
this pass nor would it be of use to him
because there is in this belt of wilderness
which lies athwart one of the oldest and
most populous areas in Europe no means of
transportation and no accommodation for
the unattached civilian.  But this of course
is a condition that will speedily pass.

In a year's time, or less, the tides of
travel will pour over these highways; and
among the travellers will be all sorts and
conditions of men; from the idle sightseers
seeking a new sensation amidst these mute
memorials of human conflict to the reverent
pilgrim following step by step the road of
sacrifice and glory trodden by his
countrymen in the Great Crusade.

It is desirable that for Canadians making
this pilgrimage there should be, so to speak,
a beaten path which they can follow with
the certainty that, with a minimum of
time, they can bring away with them
something approaching adequate understanding
of Canada's contribution to the great
European campaigns.  There is a proposition,
not without strong support in army
circles, that Canada should erect and
maintain in perpetuity a number of battle shrines
which would be stations on this pilgrimage.
The suggested sites are Ypres, Vimy Ridge,
Bourlon Wood and some point in the
district of Amiens, either in Courcelette or
further south, in the track of the Canadian
avalanche of August 8, 1918.  These
shrines, it is proposed, should contain plans
of the adjoining battle-fields in topographical
relief, maps, diagrams, detailed histories
of the actions, information as to the
Canadian cemeteries in the neighborhood—they
should be the headquarters for all that
a Canadian, ten, twenty or fifty years hence,
will want to know.  If this plan is carried
out there should also be available official
Canadian guides fully equipped to tell the
story of Canadian achievement.

The project is one well worth careful
consideration.  Canada's participation in the
war is a fountain from which succeeding
generations should drink deep, learning
thereby lessons in valor, sacrifice, patriotism
and national pride; and nothing will make
this living inspiration more available than
maintaining in perpetuity upon the
European battle-fields authentic records of the
deeds done there.  It is a reasonable
expectation that once normal conditions of
life are resumed thousands of Canadians
will yearly make the tour of the Canadian
fronts—visiting in turn the Flanders
battlefields; the scenes of the heroic achievements
around Vimy and Lens; that portion of the
tragic field of the Somme "which is forever
Canada" by virtue of our dead; and finally
following step by step the Canadian
advance during the One Hundred Days,
which saw Germany's military effort pass,
by successive disasters, from the high tide
of the July offensive to the hopeless ruin of
the November surrender.  Even a casual
inspection will take several days for, during
their 42 months of war, the Canadian troops
ranged wide and shed the glamor of their
achievements upon many localities.  The
names of these places, many of them already
storied from battles long ago, make a list
full of significance to the Canadians of
today and tomorrow.  Langemarck,
St. Julien, Festubert, St. Eloi, Sanctuary
Wood, Courcelette, Regina Trench, Vimy,
Hill Seventy, Passchendaele, Amiens,
Arras, Monchy-le-Preux, Bourlon Wood,
Cambrai, Valenciennes, Mons.

In my three days flying trip in a motor
out from Paris and back again I covered in
some sort the more southern fields of
Canadian operations.  We struck into the
battle-fronts from the west having gone north
from Paris by the traditional road to
England—out St. Denis Gate and north through
Beauvais, crossing the Somme at Abbeville
and then turning eastward towards Arras.
At St. Pol, which was the extreme limit of
the range of a high powered German naval
gun, the first signs of shell fire were seen.
Thereafter mile by mile, as we sped through
a countryside familiar to Canadian troops
as a rest area, the evidences of war damage
increased until we ran into the battlefields
of the Souchez and saw the slope of Vimy
rise gently to the sky-line.  From there our
course ran over the Ridge to that huge pile
of red-brick rubble that was Lens—once a
city of 50,000 souls; thence on through
Douai and Denain to Valenciennes.  This
was the way of the German retreat; at every
crossroads hasty repairs to the paved way
bore witness to their scheme of systematic
destruction; over every canal and stream
the road was carried on improvised bridges,
the original structures sprawling in ruined
heaps athwart the waterways.  From
Valenciennes—relatively damaged but
slightly—we ran into Cambrai, the latter half of
the road through villages that bore ample
marks of the rear-guard actions between
the Germans and the onward-pressing
Canadians.  From Cambrai—a shell of a city
systematically destroyed by fire by the
Germans as they fell back—the road to Arras
took us through the centre of the great
battlefield over which the Canadians drove the
Huns in the fighting of late August and
September—to the left a huge blur on the
sky-line seen through the driving rain was
Bourlon Wood; to the right the ruins of
the villages where the desperate German
counter-attacks at the end of September
were stopped; further on, three huge
streaks of blackened wire stretching across
the gaunt countryside marked the
once-vaunted impregnable Hindenburg line;
then to the right rose the high ground of
Monchy-le-Preux, wrested out of hand
from the Germans by the Third Division in
the early hours of a bloody August day; all
about, on both sides of the road as far as the
eye could see stretched the tortured and
scarred countryside over which the tide of
carnage flowed and ebbed for two years;
and so to Arras—a ghost city where the
shattered houses, no longer habitable, stand
in their empty loneliness.  From Arras we
went to Bapaume by a road which crossed
diagonally the old German-British front
line; from Bapaume to Albert, across the
waste of the Somme battlefield; on to
Amiens in which the tides of business are
again feebly flowing; along the highway to
Roye, with the great Canadian battlefield of
August stretching along the left for ten
miles—a road memorable, too, to Canadians
because along every mile of it Canadian
cavalry and motor machine-gun men fought
against the German flood in March 1918; in
every copse hereabouts there lie Canadian
dead.  From Roye southward to the Oise
we passed through a countryside which was
fought over, foot by foot twice last year—to
say nothing of the battles of earlier
campaigns; everywhere there were ruin,
desolation and the marks of death.  After
crossing the river the ruins of war diminished,
but not until we passed Senlis—where the
marks of the beast left by the Hun high
tide in 1914 are still to be seen—did we
leave them behind; and so came back to
Paris by the old Roman road over which
the legions marched to Flanders nearly
2,000 years ago.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE BATTLEGROUNDS OF THE SOUCHEZ`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER II


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE BATTLEGROUNDS OF THE SOUCHEZ

.. vspace:: 2

The storming of Vimy Ridge on that
wintry April morning two years ago
was neither in its actual achievement
nor in its military consequences the greatest
feat of the Canadian Expeditionary Force;
but it holds, and it may continue to hold, a
unique place in the Canadian consciousness.
It was the first cleancut definite stroke by
the Canadian Corps acting as a recognized
unit of the greater British army; and there
was in the achievement something dramatic
and climacteric which riveted the attention
of all watchers of the long-continuing duel
between the great armies along the western
front.  For Vimy, before it had any
Canadian associations, was a tragic name!  It
was the western-most bastion of German
power in Europe.  Against its gently rising
slopes the fierce French valor that had
conquered the valley of the Souchez and its
bordering uplands, had dashed itself in
vain; the hillside was white with the
unburied bones of the men who won the ridge
in October, 1915, for a day, only to be
swept back by a German counter-attack of
overwhelming force.  The Germans proudly
boasted the impregnability of a position
which protected their strangle-hold upon
the coalfields of Lens and gave them a
jumping-off place for a further adventure
westward to the Channel ports.  When the
greater portion of the Ridge was stormed in
a fierce sustained assault by the Canadian
troops on the morning of April 9, 1917, the
reverberation of the achievement went
round the world; and its echoes will long
persist.

Vimy Ridge—a swell of land five miles
in length which rises so gradually on the
southern slopes that one hardly realizes the
elevation until he stands upon the crest and
notes how the ground falls sheer away to the
eastward—marks the eastern rim of one of
the bloodiest battlegrounds of the whole
war.  Many Canadians have but the haziest
knowledge of the battles that were fought
hereabouts in the early summer of 1915;
but the flower of the highly trained armies
with which France and Germany entered
the war lie buried here.

When, after the German defeat on the
Marne in September, 1914, and the check
to the Allies on the Aisne, the race to the
northern sea began with the Germans keeping
a step in advance and thus blocking the
constant French attempt to outflank them
from the west, all the high ground in this
region was occupied by the Germans; and
when the fronts became rigid the French
found themselves in a dangerously insecure
position with the German possession of the
high hill of Notre Dame de Lorette threatening
all the coal fields of northern France
and the southern shore of the Channel.
During the winter of 1914-15 the French
organized their attack, and in the early
summer they set themselves doggedly to the
task of turning the Germans out of these
strong places.  The enemy held the
towering hill of Notre Dame and the cluster of
houses known as Ablain St. Nazaire at its
foot; across the little Souchez river the
village of Carency on a slight eminence; a
mile or so to the south the hamlet of
Neuville St. Vaast, on the crest of a swell in the
ground; southward from the latter point
and stretching eastward almost to the base
of Vimy Ridge they had prepared a huge
network and maze of trenches and redoubts
which acquired a sinister renown under the
name of the Labyrinth.

For weeks during the summer of 1915 the
battle raged here continuously; and literally
the French drove the Germans foot by foot
and yard by yard from these positions; out
of Carency and down the Souchez valley;
back step by step from the heights of Notre
Dame; trench by trench the Labyrinth was
wrested from them; and by the late summer
the Germans had withdrawn behind the
great ridge of Vimy which lay athwart the
path of the advancing French.  There they
stood savagely at bay, and when the French,
in unison with the British attack at Loos,
north of Lens, essayed in October to storm
the hill, they exacted a bloody revenge for
their earlier defeats.  Afterwards this area
became part of the British front, when the
French moved to the south bank of the
Somme; and after a year of inactivity,
varied by a single unsuccessful attack upon a
portion of the ridge's defences by a British
brigade, the Canadians, in the winter of
1916-17, took over this sector and set
themselves the task of taking the Ridge as their
initial contribution to the great spring
offensive that was foreshadowed.

I stood almost in the centre of this huge
battlefield in the closing hours of a sombre
March day; a light mist was shrouding the
crests of the uplands; in the valleys the
darkness of night was already falling; for
fleeting moments the dying sun, through a
breach in the cloud battlements, threw
gleams of wintry sunshine over the scene.
Nearby were the abandoned ruins of what
was once the hamlet of Carency.  To the
right Vimy Ridge rose slowly to the sky
line, flaring up at its northern end into the
steeper slopes of "the Pimple."  Next came
a narrow valley; and then the ridge
resumed, turning now almost due west and
rising to the height of Notre Dame de
Lorette that dominated the landscape.  At
the base of the sloping terraces that came
down from the hill-top the little river
Souchez ran, turning north-easterly through
the gorge and onward towards Lens.  This
little stream has known its current dammed
by the wedged bodies of dead men; its
banks have brimmed with human blood.
Beyond the stream at the foot of the hill
were the ruins of Ablain St. Nazaire; and
nearby all that remained of the sugar
factory about which raged an Homeric struggle,
noted in the battle bulletins of those
days.  Up those slopes, now so still in the
fading daylight, the French pushed their
way day by day and week by week until they
planted their flag on its crest.  To the south
and east they fought their way over
Neuville St. Vaast and through the tangled
mazes of the Labyrinth.  Within a radius
of three miles from the place upon which
we stood, over one hundred thousand
French soldiers who fell in six months'
fighting in 1915 lie buried.  These incredible
figures were vouched for by an officer
of high rank.

When the Canadians moved into this
area in the winter of 1916-17 they made
their homes amidst the wreckage of these
battlefields.  They took over the trenches
along the lower slopes of Vimy Ridge
which were reachable only by
communication trenches and sunken roads over open
ground in plain view in daylight of the
Germans who held the crest of the ridge and
its western slopes half-way down.  Behind
this active front they built their secondary
positions on the battlegrounds of 1915.
Thus the First Division was encamped upon
the ground of the Labyrinth; the divisional
headquarters were in a German dug-out
thirty-nine steps downward from the
surface.  The reshifting of trenches and
dugouts in this neighborhood was not, the
Canadians found, to be lightly attempted; for
the place was one huge—if unmarked—cemetery
where French and Germans by
the thousand had been buried where they fell.

Over this area for a distance of miles the
Canadian corps had planted its camps as
the line moved forward in front.  Along the
roads which cross in all directions one
could read the sign-posts of the regiments
pointing the way to collections of Nissen
huts and smaller wooden structures.  Here,
too, were defensive trenches and strong
redoubts prepared for the reception of the
enemy in the event of a German advance.
One could easily imagine how busy this
scene had been in the summer and autumn
of 1917 when the Canadian corps were
encamped hereabouts.  But on the March
evening when I saw it, it was bleak and
cheerless beyond the power of words to
express.  The tide of war had flowed past and
left the wrecked countryside vacant—the
huts empty and the camps abandoned save
for, here and there, a handful of men
engaged in salvage work; the roadways, once
swarming with life, deserted and silent!
Over all desolation and loneliness rested
like a pall; everywhere the wreckage of
battle, the debris of destruction;
everywhere the sense of man's mortality!  A
grim and melancholy expanse; yet withal
holy ground, for here men by the tens of
thousands died for mankind!





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER III


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION

.. vspace:: 2

Wherever in our flying trip we
touched the border line between the
actual battlefields and the secondary
districts of the war—as for instance Amiens
and Valenciennes—we saw human life
finding its way into normal channels; but over
the areas of continued and desperate
fighting there was still the abomination of
desolation.  Here in the very centre of an
ancient populous civilization there stretches
for miles in every direction a wilderness—not
the empty loneliness of a new land
awaiting the inflowing of human life, but a
man-made desert speaking of the ruthless
savagery of man in the sway of his passions.
Here there are ruined farmsteads, vanished
villages, once fair forests shredded into pulp,
huge piles of debris marking the site of
storied cities, destroyed temples—and hardly a
sign of human life except the last dribbles
of the great tide of uniformed men that
once poured over these highways.  Thus an
afternoon drive from Arras to Cambrai was
through a profound silence.  Here was a
wide highway running straight between two
famous French cities through the heart of
an ancient land.  In the whole distance we
met only two or three military cars engaged
in the aftermath of war; and a few small
working parties of "Chinks" thousands of
miles from their native Manchuria.

Standing on the motor's seat, one looked
north and south, east and west to the
skyline.  Everywhere silence, profound,
brooding, fateful!  Not a curling smoke-wreath
on the horizon bespoke a human habitation.
The country is open, rolling upland—in its
physical conformation it seemed to me
almost the counterpart of southern central
Manitoba as it was 30-odd years ago before
the industry of man dotted it with thriving
farmsteads.

The acme of destruction is to be witnessed
at Lens.  This was the work of the Canadian
artillery.  In October, 1915 campaign the
British drove for Hill Seventy, north of
Lens, and the French for Vimy Ridge, both
fruitlessly, despite initial success.  It was
assumed in all the "expert" military writing
of that date that the possession by the Allies
of these two hills would force the evacuation
of the Lens coalfields by the Germans.  The
Canadians took Vimy Ridge in April, 1917;
they pushed down the reverse side of the
ridge and across the level ground to the
outskirts of Lens within the next three months;
in August they stormed Hill Seventy by one
of the most brilliant minor operations of
the war.  But the Hun, contrary to
the forecasts of the strategists, refused to
quit Lens.  It was half ringed by the
Canadians, who kept it drowned in poison gas
and buried under a constant rain of artillery
projectiles; but the Germans, hidden in the
rabbit warrens with which they honeycombed
the foundations of the city, held
on, and to every attempt to take possession
of the ruined town they opposed a desperate
and successful resistance.  The Canadian
plans included the storming in October,
1917, of Salumines Hill to the south-east of
the city.  Had this been done—and no
Canadian staff officer had any doubt of the
practicability of the enterprise—the
Germans in Lens would have been trapped like
rats; but the demands of the higher strategy
intervened and the Canadians were shifted
to the mud of Flanders, where they achieved
the brilliant but fruitless distinction of
taking Passchendaele ridge.

So the Germans stayed on in Lens, and
the Canadians, when they returned to their
sector, resumed their daily occupation of
spraying them with gas and pounding them
with shell—with the result that when the
line gave further south and the Germans
had to fall back, the Allied armies entered
Lens to find it the completest expression of
the destructive possibilities of artillery fire
that was supplied by any theatre of war.  In
this city, which once housed 50,000 people,
not a single house remains—it is one huge
red mass of red brick rubble through which
roadways have been painfully excavated by
labor battalions.  Yet a few of the original
inhabitants have crept back and can be seen
standing in little disconsolate groups around
the dust heaps which were their homes—living
meanwhile in the German dugouts
under the town.  As I drove through the
town on a blustering March morning, there
still lingered in the air, four months after
the firing of the last shot, the faint smell of
human mortality.  For in these huge
rubbish heaps, if they are ever cleared away,
will be found hundreds of Germans buried
by the shells that destroyed them.

One hears controversy amongst the
experts as to whether Lens or Arras is the
most affecting illustration of what war does
to organized human society.  There is much
to be said for both sides of the argument.
In Lens ruin is so complete as to almost blur
the sense of human association; but Arras is
the pitiful spectacle of a huge collection of
uninhabitable houses—domestic shrines
from which the fire has gone cold and can
never be revived.  There they stood gaunt,
tottering and cheerless—windows out, doors
hanging awry, gaping holes in the walls, the
roofs fallen in, the broken and sagging floors
and all the pitiful and touching relics of
destroyed domestic life, pictures still
hanging on the walls, broken furniture, torn and
destroyed clothing.  The Grande Place of
Arras—a succession of attractive buildings
in the Spanish style all built to a plan, with
a wide colonnaded walk beneath them
around the square—is a dreadful, heart-rending
ruin.  An occasional building in
Arras affords shelter to returning refugees;
and there is here a considerable and
increasing population.  In one narrow street a
number of shops have reopened and make
as brave a showing as is possible among the
ruins.

Lens and Arras are the ruins of war—the
by-product of great powers in a death-grip.
But Cambrai is a ruin of another sort.  It
is a monument to the malignant spirit of the
Hun in defeat.  As the British and the
Canadians closed in from the south and the
north they spared the city which they knew
was fated to fall to them; no shell fell in its
borders save by inadvertence.  But this did
not avail to save this ancient famous town.
The Canadians entered it to find it deserted,
all the civilian population having been
carried off, and on fire from a hundred
conflagrations systematically set with the aid of
inflammable bombs, petrol and firewood;
and while the Germans fell back towards
their own land a pillar of smoke from the
burning city bespoke their rage at being
robbed of their prey.  Cambrai is the
burned-out shell of a town—a mere wraith
of its former charms.  All these cities—and
to them may be added, St. Quentin, Albert,
Ypres, and a hundred smaller places—will
have to be rebuilt from the foundations
upward; but first they will have to be
demolished stone by stone and the rubbish
carried away—a huge task which is not yet
begun, awaiting perhaps the reparation
money which will be of right the first
after-the-war charge against the resources of
Germany.

In the track of the war machine there
was no sign as we passed of any attempt to
repair the ravages of four campaigns—it
will take no trifling outlay in money, labor
and ingenuity, for instance, to turn the
battlefield of the Somme into a habitable
countryside; it is now "mere land desperate and
done with," like "the ominous tract"
through which Childe Roland rode to his
fate.  But on the borders of the actual
battlefields work was going forward to prepare
the ground for the coming crop.  Between
Lens and Douai the Germans had scarred
the country with a series of defensive
positions; and gangs of German military
prisoners were busily engaged, under the
watchful eye of overseers, in refilling the
deep trenches and smoothing the fields.
That was a sight often repeated as we
passed from the battle wilderness to the less
damaged belt about it; and there was about
it a touch of satisfying ironic fitness!  For
these trenches were built by forced French
labor of old men, women and children under
German taskmasters.  For the first ten or
fifteen miles out of Amiens along the road
to Roye—the scene of a sharp battle in the
open which did relatively little damage to
the country—many gangs of German
prisoners were at work with their spades; while
the French farmers were busily turning
furrows in the fields upon which armies met in
furious conflict last August.  Here and
there a small tractor could be seen at work.
Almost invariably as the motor went by the
German prisoners stopped their work and
with wistful eyes watched it pass down the
road to the outside world of freedom.  It
was not difficult to read the thoughts in the
minds of these men, most of them young
and many of them not unintelligent in looks.
This was the end of their dream of world
domination, their reward for their
surrender of life and thought to the homicidal
maniac who reigned at Potsdam and now
hides in fear and trembling from the wrath
of the world in an obscure retreat in Holland.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE MARKS OF WAR`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER IV


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE MARKS OF WAR

.. vspace:: 2

A British general who fought
through the whole war recently
observed in the British House of
Commons, of which he is now a member,
that "war is a most disgusting, barbarous
and preposterous state of affairs."  One feels
how true this is as he passes through the war
area with its all-too-clear record of death,
loss, famine and incalculable human
suffering when he is not under the control of
boundless admiration for the valor, sacrifice,
tenacity, endurance and ingenuity evoked
by this war in men who five years ago
seemed ordinary men and will tomorrow be
again plain citizens.  One swings between
the two emotions as he travels in the wake
of War and takes note of the sign-manuals
which it has left everywhere along the way.

It seems incredible that life should have
been at all possible along the front as one
goes over these battlefields and takes note of
conditions.  The trenches have partly fallen
in; but it takes little imagination to recreate
the scene.  Here are the abominable mud
ditches which were dignified by the name
of trenches, the funk-holes in the mud walls,
the dug-outs, the long winding and partly
sunken roads of approach, the slightly more
commodious trenches in reserve and the
camps behind.  Judged by any accepted
standard of living in 1913—or 1923—one
would say that a Hottentot or an Australian
bushman, indurated to living under the
most primitive conditions, would find life
intolerable here in a fortnight's time apart
altogether from any question of danger from
external causes.  That gently-nurtured men
from homes, where loving mothers or
assiduous wives made the mustard plaster or the
hot-water bottle the sure sequel for an
inadvertent wetting, should have "toughed" it
here for months and years under all the
variegated brands of European weather,
including that damnable combination of
rain, fog, damp and chill which they call
winter in those parts, under the always
imminent possibility of sudden and terrible
death without becoming brutalized is a
heartening proof of the greatness of the
human soul and its power over the influences
that make for baseness.  It was not
incredible to me that Canadian men should have
stormed Vimy Ridge, breaking through
the elaborate German defences as though
they were made of pack-thread; what was
incredible was that they had lived under
conditions of constant danger and
never-relaxing strain in burrows along the foot
of the hill for months before the attack, with
their food and supplies brought in precariously
at night over level fields completely
dominated by the German guns on the top
of the hill.  It was the high faith that failed
not by the way even more than the iron
valor that prevailed in the hour of battle
that reveals most surely the heroic qualities
of our soldiers in the field.  Some few miles
of the original battlefields showing the
opposing fronts, the original trenches, the deep
pock-marks of the shell holes, no man's lands
with its markings of secret, nightly warfare
should be kept intact in order that posterity
may appreciate in some little measure what
life in the front line meant in the Great War.

Everywhere as one goes through the battle
area, there can be seen one ever-recurring
mark of battle that will endure—the graves
of those who fell.  The war area is in truth
one vast cemetery.  Look almost where one
will from the road and he will see, here and
there, the white cross, or clusters of them,
showing where soldiers were buried where
they fell.  (A stick driven in the ground
with a helmet on the top of it—there are
almost forests of these along the Cambrai
road—marks the grave of a German soldier).
There was never a war where so
much care was taken to keep a record of the
resting place of fallen soldiers; and as time
passes bodies will be taken from their
isolated graves on the battlefields and placed
in great military cemeteries where they will
receive in perpetuity the care of a reverent
posterity.  In the main the unplaced dead
will be those who fell in territory which, as
the result of the action, passed into enemy
hands for the time being.  Everywhere
along the roadways there are small
Canadian graveyards, many of which will
doubtless remain undisturbed for all time.  Thus
no one will ever propose to disturb the
slumbers of the seventy or eighty
Canadians—among them Lance-Corporal Sifton,
V.C.—who rest in a huge mine crater on
Vimy Ridge.  The crater has been rounded
and smoothed; a huge cross outlined on the
earth at the bottom of the hole marks the
common grave; and at the rim of the crater,
visible from the roadside, is a modest,
temporary memorial bearing the names of the
fallen.

As we crossed the battlefields of
Courcelette by the Bapaume-Albert highway
Canadian soldiers in numbers appeared by
the roadside.  Upon inquiry we learned that
nearly 400 Canadians, representing most
branches of the service, were engaged in
collecting the Canadian dead of the Somme
battlefields into one large cemetery which
will be maintained by the Canadian authorities.
Further along the road towards Albert
we came to two wayside cemeteries.  One
to the right showed a profusion of white
crosses arranged not in orderly rows but in
little groups, showing that the soldiers
whose graves were thus marked had been
buried where they fell.  This marked the
resting place of the Tyneside-Scottish
battalion which was wiped out in the attack upon
La Boisselle on July 1, 1916—the opening
day of the Somme battle.  The other
graveyard, on the other side of the road further
on, was in neat and perfect order behind a
trim railing.  Here there are Canadians,
British, South African and Australian
graves—the Canadians predominating
although the striking large cross which marks
the cemetery is erected to the memory of
the Australian Expeditionary Force.  The
place made such an appeal that we stopped
for a closer inspection.  As I stepped
through the gate into the trim enclosure the
first name I saw was that of an old personal
friend and fellow-craftsman—brave, gentle,
kindly, generous John Lewis, editor of the
*Montreal Star*, who fell in October, 1916.
Lewis, American-born but Canadian by
adoption and by the great sacrifice, sleeps
between two young Canadians—to the left
the young son of the Bishop of Quebec, to
the right Lieutenant Outerson, of the
Winnipeg Grenadiers.  Among the other graves
here is that of Lieutenant H. H. Scott, of
Quebec, whose body was retrieved from the
battlefield by his own father, Canon
Frederick George Scott—churchman, poet
and hero—and by him buried in this God's
acre where dust of the British race from the
uttermost parts of the earth and the isles
of the sea slumbers in the "rest after stormie
seas," bespoken by the poet as a high
measure of human felicity.

These notes on the mementoes which war
has left in its train may be perhaps closed by
one more cheerful and hopeful in character.
This was a scene on the Roye-Amiens
highway midway between these towns; not in
itself unique for we saw it repeated elsewhere
in what might be called the sub-area of
war.  It had within it the promise of a
future that will, so far as this is now
possible, repair the past.  We had just passed
the "front" as it was during the summer of
1916.  First come two shallow French
trenches not strongly guarded by wire
entanglements; then 500 yards of no-man's-land;
then the formidable German
defences—three offensive lines of entrenchments
heavily wired; and after a short interval
two further lines equally strong.  It must
be admitted that the Germans were
watchful and industrious.  The wire,
weather-beaten by exposure, stretched across the
countryside like wide black ribands.

As we passed into the relatively unharmed
country beyond we saw, standing by the
roadside, a one-horse wagon piled high with
simple household necessities—bedding,
furniture and food.  Around it was a family
group, with actually shining, smiling faces—a
rarity this, these days, in the once gay
land of France.  There were the middle-aged
father and mother, a young man in
war-worn uniform, safely home from the
wars, a fair young girl of perhaps seventeen
and a younger girl.  They were busily
engaged in unloading the wagon and
carrying their household goods—where?  No
building was anywhere in sight—nothing
but the inevitable pile of rubbish by the
roadway.  But on a closer look we saw that
the cellar of the house that had once stood
there had been fitted over with a rude
temporary roof and to this refuge this reunited
family, after the hardships and perils of the
war, had come home with a joy and thanksgiving
that shone in their eyes.  This was Home!

Thus the human heart, unconquerable by
adversity, resolutely sets about repairing the
ravages of time and war!  Man rebuilds his
ruined home, sets up again the family altars,
renews the sweet amenities of life, refills the
fields.  The soldier, husbandman once more,
turns the brown furrow—"God-like making
provision for mankind"—and sees the
cheerful smoke from his household fires mark the
citadel of his happiness, the shrine of his
desires!  Behind lies the wreckage, the pain,
the terrors of those impossible, those
unimaginable years of war—ahead stretches
the future of clean and fruitful work, the
dear rewards of love and affection, the
blessings of a healing and fruitful Peace,
never to be broken again—else these
millions have died in vain—by the trumpets
of the Lords of War!





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE CANADIAN HAMMER STROKES`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER V


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE CANADIAN HAMMER STROKES

.. vspace:: 2

The epic of the Canadian achievement
in the last hundred days of the Great
War must be written if there is in
Canada a man capable of writing it.  It must
be accurate in its technique; but no technical
accuracy will suffice to tell the story.  There
must be told not only the record of the
actual achievements, but their relationship
to the wider strategy of the war.  Their
impact upon the final issue of this
super-human struggle must be interpreted, that
the Canadians of to-day and their posterity
forever may know what contribution
Canada made to the freeing of the world from
the menace of Prussianism.  All Canadians
know that in August the Canadian corps
made an unexampled advance near Amiens
in the great offensive on the British front;
that nearly a month later they smashed their
way through the "impregnable" Drocourt-Queant
line; that by a brilliant tactical
stroke they crossed the Canal du Nord and
captured Bourlon Wood; that they
outflanked Cambrai from the north compelling
its evacuation; that they wrested
Valenciennes from the enemy by a concentric
movement from the north and south; that,
assisted at times by two British divisions,
they, four divisions strong, met and defeated
during the three months 47 German
divisions with immense captures of men, guns
and supplies.

These, considered by themselves, were
great feats worthy of commemoration but it
is only when they are viewed in their
relation to the great struggle that raged from
the Alps to the sea that their full
significance and value are revealed.  These
achievements were a series of successive
hammerstrokes upon the whole western
German position; and more than any other
related series of military operations they
contributed to the collapse, at a date far
earlier than the most hopeful had dared to
fix, of that huge fortress which for four
years had defied the genius, the resourcefulness
and the valor of the Allied western
powers.  This is the plain, simple truth;
and it is the business of Canada to see that
in the final telling of the last phases of the
war this fact—of such immense bearing
upon our future national development and
our status in the world—is not allowed to
be obscured.

The Canadian corps came into the final
campaign with certain very evident
advantages which stood them in good stead.  They
had suffered no losses—apart from the
cavalry and machine-gun sections—in the
terrible battles of March and April when
the German drives down the valley of the
Somme and through Flanders towards the
sea were stopped just before they
culminated in allied disaster.  This does not mean
that during this anxious period the Canadian
corps, as some seem to think, enjoyed
a luxurious and reposeful existence removed
from the perils and anxieties of war.  When
the German offensive began the Canadians
were holding a front along Vimy Ridge of
9,000 yards; when it ended they were in
charge of 35,000 yards of front line trenches.
They did no fighting because the Germans
did not attack them; had they done so they
would have got a warm reception.  During
this anxious period the Canadians deepened
their defensive position by five miles—in
the rear of Vimy Ridge the new trenches
then dug can be seen on every side; they
reorganized their machine-gun detachments,
increasing their fighting power by
fifty per cent.; and they had organized every
Canadian in the area down to the cooks
into fighting bodies—all inspired by a
common determination to resist until the death.
In those dark days, they served by standing
and waiting!

Nevertheless they profited, of course, by
their happy escape at that time from the
fearful sacrifice which other British
divisions on the western front had to make.
When the time came to take their place in
the line for the great—and as it developed—the
decisive offensive, they were in splendid
condition—divisions over-strength,
thoroughly equipped, hardened by an iron
discipline cheerfully borne and uplifted by
a consciousness that the days of inaction
were over and that their hour had struck.

As the Canadian troops moved south from
their long-held positions at Vimy to take
their place in the line of battle at Amiens
one phenomenon—which was rightly
interpreted as a portent of victory—was noted.
The troops began again spontaneously to
sing as they covered the miles along the
straight undeviating French roads which
are heartbreaking to infantry on the march.
In the early days the Canadian was a singing
army; but as the iron of war entered its
soul it fell silent and the long marches to
the battlefields were made in dogged silence.
But in those bright days in early August
serene confidence in their power to
conquer filled the hearts of the Canadian
soldiers; and their cheerful and confident
voices filled the air with Canadian songs.
From then to the end the Canadians sang
as they fought their way from victory to
victory.

The participation by the Canadian corps
in the battle of Amiens was a well-kept
secret until they went over the top.  The
Germans were misled by a calculated
manoeuvre into believing that the
Canadians had been moved north into Flanders;
the French lining up for their drive
forward south of the Roye road did not know
until the eve of the battle that the troops
immediately to their left across the highway,
which were to move forward with them,
were the Canadians.  The news was not
unwelcome to them; for the reputation of
the Canadians as shock troops of the first
order was already established.  The road
runs through the large semi-open wood
where the whole Canadian army remained
hidden during August 7th; with the falling
of darkness they moved forward in the
charge of guides to their appointed posts—the
ground being quite unfamiliar to them.
The plan of battle called for the advance
at zero hour by the Canadians between the
Amiens-Roye road and the Amiens-Ham
railway, an initial front of 7,000 yards; on
the left beyond the railway were the
Australians and on the right across the road were
the French.  The dividing line of the
highway was not rigidly observed.  The 9th
brigade, forming the extreme right of the
Canadian force, delivered its attack from
the right of the road and captured Rifle
Wood—a daring and successful stroke well
worth the telling which had much to do
with the almost instantaneous success all
along the line of the Canadian advance, and
further along the road on the following day
the Canadians stormed across the road in
support of the French and taking the
Germans on the flank and in reverse made
possible a break through at one of the most
obstinately defended points of the enemy
front.

This was the first occasion upon which
the Canadians met the enemy in open fighting;
and the German expectation that troops
experienced only in trench fighting would
be at their mercy in field manoeuvres developed
at once into a catastrophic disappointment.
Of all the battlefields of the war the
terrain here shows the least signs of
conflict—due to the rapid retirement of the
Germans once their front lines were smashed.
From the highway most of the battlefield
can be seen; and the story of the extraordinary
advance of the Canadians by which
a huge wedge was driven into the German
front can be easily told by a competent
guide—of which there never should be any
lack.  No Canadian making a pious
pilgrimage over the Canadian front should
overlook the Amiens battlefield.  An
eminent military authority has made the
prediction that in the ultimate judgment of the
historian of the tactical developments of the
1918 campaign, the complete smashing of
the German defence at this point by the
Canadian corps in the early hours of August
8, will be regarded as one of the decisive
turning points of the campaign.  It is worth
noting, in this connection, that Berlin
despatches, quoting from advance proofs of
his book on the war, credit Ludendorff with
the statement that the success of the
Franco-British offensive at Amiens on August 8th
destroyed the last hope of the Germans for
final victory.  The Canadians were the
spear-head of that attack and made the
deepest advance, on the opening day of the
offensive, into the enemy's territory.

Within ten days the Canadian contribution
to the Allied offensive in the Amiens
sector was completed.  On August 22, the
decision was reached by the high command
to shift the whole Canadian force north to
Arras in preparation for the attack upon
the Drocourt-Queant position; in the early
hours of August 26—less than 100 hours
later—the Canadians burst through the
early morning mist upon the astonished
Germans, who thought them fifty miles away,
and wrested the high ground at Monchy le
Preux and the positions in alignment with
it from them.  From this jumping-off place
the Canadians advanced resolutely and
steadily towards Cambrai; in a week's time
the much vaunted Hindenburg line was
behind them; towards the end of
September, upon the very morning upon which
the Germans planned the recovery of lost
ground the Canadians forestalled them,
pushed across the Canal du Nord and
enveloped Bourlon Wood where the
British advance a year earlier had been stayed;
then driving forward across the Arras-Cambrai
highway they put in jeopardy the German
control of Cambrai, the pivot upon
which the whole western German defence
swung.  There followed the desperate
attempt by the Germans to save Cambrai
by the recapture of Bourlon Wood; their
failure involved the evacuation of the city
and the undermining of the defensive lines
to the south.  At Cambrai the Canadians
passed the crest of the hill—thereafter the
"going" was rapid and comparatively easy
to a goal already in sight.  The capture of
Valenciennes was an interesting incident in
a widespread advance by the whole Allied
front from the Meuse to the sea; and the
last day of the war found the Canadians as
the advance guard of the British forces
victoriously encamped upon the very ground
where in August, 1914, the Old
Contemptibles—that immortal vanished army—first
threw the British sword into the rapidly-rising
scale in a determination, amply
vindicated by legions animated by their
example and inspired by their achievements
who followed them, to right the balance.
This completion of the full circle of
British sacrifice in the last hours of the war by
the troops of an overseas Dominion which,
when the first shots were fired, had no
military history and dreamed not of its aptitude
for war is one of those profound historic
coincidences which make an appeal, to be
felt rather than expressed, to that sense of
Destiny which in times of Fate takes
possession of the human soul.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`THE CIVILIAN AS WARRIOR`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VI


.. class:: center medium bold

   THE CIVILIAN AS WARRIOR

.. vspace:: 2

Not the least astonishing of the many
surprises of the war to the Germans
was the, to them, incredible capacity
for swift preparation for war which was
shown by the democratic and unmartial
British nations under the spur of deep
national feeling plus driving necessity.  In
their careful preparation for sudden war
and overwhelming victory they had
believed with reason, judging by all that the
past could teach, that their margin of
advantage, because of their mighty armies
and the vast numbers of their trained
officers, could never be overcome by those
nations which in time of peace had failed
to educate their people into a psychological
readiness for the mass war and to equip
them to wage it.  They remembered how
vain had been the rally of the French levies
under Gambetta's leadership in 1871.  For
Kitchener's army, when Great Britain set
herself to create out of nothing but the valor
and willingness of the people a buckler to
stem the German flood, the German chiefs
expressed a contemptuous and pitying
scorn; while they did not give even this
measure of regard to the Dominions' contingents
when they rushed overseas to take their
part in the defence of civilization.  These
they regarded as mere mobs of untrained
militia men, unkempt, undisciplined and
without competent leaders, who would be
scattered, like leaves before the tempest, by
a mere handful of drilled and well-bullied
German soldiers.  At that time no German
mind could have conceived the possibility
of such an impossible fact as that within two
years it would be a fixed rule of the German
army that Canadian troops in the front line
trenches must always be faced, across No
Man's Land, by Prussian Guards or Bavarian
shock troops.

Nor was the low opinion of the military
worth of these volunteer armies confined to
arrogant Germans; there were doubters
a-plenty at home.  Thus a Canadian public
man held forth despairingly to me at that
time upon the hopelessness of opposing to
the highly-trained German armies these
hastily organized battalions of men
summoned from civil occupations.  For one
thing was it not a fact, confirmed by all
military experience and accepted as
veritable holy writ, that an officer, capable of
commanding men, could not be made in less
than seven years?  Unless the French, who
were a military nation, had a sufficient
surplusage of officers partly to equip the
British armies it would be nothing but
slaughter to pit these untrained hordes
against the Prussian hordes.  Nor was this
Jeremiah alone in his gloom!

One can recall that there was a certain
nervous trepidation among Canadians when,
the early months of 1915, it became
known that the Canadian troops were in the
front line and likely at any moment to be
put to the test of actual fighting.  The men
of this first division were separated from
their civilian pursuits by barely half a year
of time; they were, by all the standards of
European war as to training, mere militia.
The test came in April, 1915, when the
Germans under a rolling barrage of poison
gas—a new and terrifying weapon of
war—sought to break through the allied front in
the Ypres salient at a point where it was
held partly by French African troops and
partly by the new levies from Canada.  The
story need not be re-told to Canadians.
The gas terror broke the nerve for the
moment of the African troops, and they fled in
panic; the Canadians plugged the line and
held it against all odds until reinforcements
came up and the danger was past.  It was
said at the time that the reason why the
Canadians held on was that they did not know
enough about the rules of the war game to
realize that they would be justified under
the conditions in falling back.  Of all
the myriad emotions that filled the hearts of
the Canadians during those days of sheer
stark horror fear was the most absent.  An
officer, now of high rank, who talked with
me in France about the battle of Ypres said
that the first solid fact that emerged from
the confusion of the surprise attack was the
instant resolution by Canadians of all ranks
to stand their ground whatever might
betide.  Non-combatants hurried to their
officers to ask what they could do to help.
"From that moment," said the officer, "I
had no doubts whatever about the Canadian
army; I knew that not potentially but
actually they were troops of the first rank."

In the War Memorials paintings shown
in London in December—to be housed later
in Ottawa in some fitting setting—there was
a picture which, despite its cubist
freakishness, put on canvas, for all men to see, the
soul of Canada at war.  Everything about
the picture was wrong except its symbolism
which was compelling in its truth.  The
canvas, shrieking with its high hues, was
filled with Turcos in panic flight crowding
one another in their terror, while over them
billowed the yellow poison pall of death;
but in the midst of the maelstrom the
roaring Canadian guns stood, immovable and
unyielding, served by gunners who rose
superior alike to the physical terrors of the
battle and the moral contagion of fear.  The
foundations of the world were rocking but
the guns stood firm!

Ypres, indeed, revealed the basic quality
upon which the achievements of the
Canadians in the field rested—that fortitude,
moral and physical, which in the day of
battle and the hour of trial triumphed over
every human weakness and made them the
implacable and irresistible vindicators of
divine justice.  In the early summer of 1918
when there was imminent danger of the
whole western front being crushed under
the weight of the German advance, Sir
Arthur Currie, the commander of the Canadian
corps, in a speech at a Canadian dinner
in London, made a remark which shocked
and thrilled his hearers.  He said he was
the proudest man in the world because he
commanded the Canadian corps; and the
saddest because it was doomed to die.  Thus
he gave notice that, if the line were
overwhelmed, the Canadians would die fighting.
That was the darkest hour that comes before
the dawn.  No such glorious but tragic fate
awaited the Canadians.  The future held
for them not the guerdon of inexpugnable
heroism in disaster but the bright badge
of victory.  When they struck camp and
unfurled their banners for the new
campaign they marched not to Thermopylae
but to Waterloo.

But much more than the capacity to conquer
in the actual clash of the battlefield
went to the making of the victorious
Canadian army.  These civilians, called from the
bench, the office, the farm and the forest
showed an aptitude for war—exemplified
also in varying degrees by all the democratic
armies—that must have seemed uncanny
to the German High Command, hopelessly
committed by training and inclination to
the view that great and conquering armies
could only be created in nations as the result
of precedent and long-continuing conditions:
among them the constant familiarizing
of the popular mind with the idea of
war as a weapon of national policy, the
universal training of men of military age, the
careful cultivation of an officer class, the
maintenance of a general staff of highly
equipped experts and strategists who
devoted their lives to the art of war.
Considering their environment and viewpoint it
was inevitable that they should regard it
as simply preposterous that a civilian army
officered and commanded by men of their
own type and class—farmers, artisans;
clerks, bankers, lawyers, doctors, engineers,
journalists, real estate agents—should be
able to dispute the field with the disciplined
legions of Germany.  They could not
realize what this war has established
beyond all question, that the general principles
upon which war is waged are simple
and easily grasped.

War is a proposition to apply to a very
definite and distinguishable object, all
available power.  It thus becomes in its essence
a huge business problem, fundamentally
one of engineering and organization.  It
was speedily demonstrated in the war that
the qualities which make for success in
civilian life in almost every field of
endeavor are also the qualities which are
necessary for successful leadership in war.
The civilian mind with its initiative, its
readiness to improvise means to an end, its
disregard for precedent as such, its willingness
to subordinate venerable sacred theories
to modern hard facts, did not suffer in the
clash with the stereotyped military mind
despite its larger equipment of technical
knowledge.  All the democratic armies
were fertile in inventions and expedients,
which were gradually incorporated in the
practice of the armies to their great good.
A lengthy article—or a book—could be
filled with a record of Canadian contributions
to the art of war—many of them rapid
improvisations when issues turned on
minutes.  One hears much about them as he
goes about in France—and not always from
Canadians either.

Thus I was much entertained at Arras
by a British officer of artillery who told me
how one of his fellow-officers, a young
Canadian, had pitted his profound
knowledge of artillery fire, which he brought
from an insurance office in Winnipeg,
against the inherited and assembled wisdom
of the higher-ups to their ultimate conversion
after an actual test had vindicated his
theory.  I shall not here recount how the
Canadian soldiers at Ypres were supplied
with ready-made gas masks upon the occasion
of the first gas attack though it will
doubtless be duly recorded in some grave
history of the war.  The trench raid, which
came to be one of the constant factors of the
war, was a Canadian invention.  It was a
Canadian doctor, transferred from civil
practice to the front, who first showed the
way to cope with trench feet, a war disease
which at one time threatened to destroy the
British army.  The Canadian army led the
way in the skilful application of machine-gun
power to the necessities of attack and
defence; and its system of massing the
machine-guns in units instead of distributing
them through companies, with their
accompanying employment for barrages
and indirect fire, would have been extended
to the whole army if the war had continued.
These are noted only as illustrations; the
whole question of Canadian resourcefulness
in the field, with its possibilities of infinite
interest, cannot be dealt with here.

One lesson of this war is thus of vast
significance to Canada and to all democracies.
It is in brief that a country of free men,
engaged and proficient in the countless
occupations of civil life, is always potentially
formidable in war.  When we build our
country for peace we build it for war, too,
if the need arises.  Our sure defence is not
the soldier in his uniform but the patriot
citizen in his plain civilian attire.  The
vindication of this profound truth has been
upon a scale of such magnitude that it is
difficult to think that ever again in the
history of the human race any aspiring
kaiser or Napoleon—white or yellow—will
dream that he can, by enslaving his own
people, provide himself with a weapon with
which to conquer the world.





.. vspace:: 4

.. _`COMPENSATIONS`:

.. class:: center large bold

   CHAPTER VII


.. class:: center medium bold

   COMPENSATIONS

.. vspace:: 2

I rode out to the Canadian battlefields
from a city where for seven weeks there
had been going on a determined, though
partly hidden, tug-of-war between conflicting
ambitions, some of them far from high-minded;
and, after my pilgrimage over the
grounds where men by the hundreds of
thousands died for an idea, which many of
them only vaguely realized though they felt
its influence in their hearts, I returned to
the same atmosphere of controversy where
the keenest discussions turned upon the
degree of the reward that should be allotted
to this or that country for the services of the
men who had made for themselves the utter
and complete sacrifice.  The contrast could
not but suggest reflections upon the relative
contributions to the future security of the
world—which was supposed to be their
common object—of the soldiers who won
the war and the statesmen who were building
a peace upon their achievements.  There
was some satisfaction in recalling that the
Prime Minister of Canada was reported to
have said, at a certain meeting, that not a
single Canadian soldier had died in order
that any country might add a mile of land
to its territory.

In one of his addresses to the Plenary
Conference President Wilson made a striking
reference to the United States soldiers.
"As I go about the streets here," he said,
"I see everywhere the American uniform.
Those men came into the war after we had
uttered our purpose.  They came as
crusaders, not merely to win a war but to win a
cause."  This language applies still more
aptly to the soldiers of Canada.  No participant
in the war has so clear a record of
disinterestedness as Canada.  The United
States came in late after repeated and
deliberate attacks upon its national honor
really left no alternative to a proud nation;
but Canada, in keeping with a deep and true
instinct, drew her sword at the first blast of
the war trumpet.  There was no calculation
about Canada's entrance into the war;
nor was there ambition for territory or trade
or glory.  There was an intuitive recognition
that this was Armageddon; and that if
the powers of hell were not to overturn the
world there would be need of us.

There is much idle discussion as to who
won the war.  The answer is that it was won
by the allies; and that the help of every one
of them was essential to the final result.
During the war we were told, by little
Canadians and would-be-shirkers, that in a
conflict of such range and violence the
contribution of Canada, however great it might
be in relation to the country's resources,
could not be a deciding factor; and that,
therefore, our canny course was to turn the
war to our advantage by supplying goods
and war materials to the allies at war prices.
That counsel of infamy was spurned by a
generous people, and Canada made her
sacrifice of life and treasure to the last ounce
of her power.  The war is over and won,
and the cost is known—a huge debt that will
long burden us, a great army of maimed
men and sixty thousand Canadian graves in
France and Flanders.  Was the sacrifice
worth while?  Are there compensations for
our grief and loss?  There is an answer to
these questions from the battlefields and it
is one of consolation.

It would be ludicrous to say that Canada
won the war; but the view that if Canada
had kept out or had limited her contribution
to a mere nominal participation the
war would not have been won, can be held
with a clear mind by every Canadian.  The
war was almost lost many times; it was saved
on occasions by the narrowest of margins,
both as to time and force.  It was saved by
the defence of Liege by the Belgians; by
the miraculous rally of the allied forces at
the Marne; by the holding of the line by the
British in the first battle of Ypres; by the
repeating of this achievement at the second
battle of Ypres by the Canadians; by the
glorious resistance by the French at
Verdun; by the tenacity with which the bent
line was held a year ago; and by that
marvelous rally of all the allied powers, in
which Canada joined, after the narrow
escape from disaster last year, which
supplied as though from inexhaustible
reservoirs the resources in men and material that
crushed the Germans in the summer
offensive.  Canada has the compensation of
knowing that the first object of her war
contribution—the infliction of complete and
overwhelming defeat upon Kaiserism—was
fully realized in part by her exertions.
But the soldiers—not only of Canada but
of all the democratic countries—were
inspired by something more than a
determination to defeat and punish the Germans.
They all had in some measure the feeling
that they were engaged in a crusade for the
making of a better world in which wars of
aggression should cease.  They fought,
many of them consciously, for a peace which
should endure because it would rest upon
justice and fraternity.  It rests with the
statesmen of Paris to keep faith with the
aspiration which turned millions of
peace-loving men into militant crusaders.  If they
succeed only in patching up the old order
under a pretentious false front, it will be
only too true that much of the sacrifice will
have been in vain.  But though the conditions
in Paris are far from cheerful, it is still
possible to hope for a peace that will achieve
the immediate object of the war—the just
punishment of Germany and her allies; and
will have in it, as well, the healing qualities
that will safeguard the world against the
repetition of these horrors.  The responsibility
that rests upon the world's elder
statesmen, in session in Paris, is immeasurable;
and pitiful will be their place in history
if, in the judgment of posterity, they
turn to base uses the high devotion that
strewed the battlefields of Europe with the
bones of the generous youth of their countries.

The national compensations to Canada
for her participation in the war would not
in themselves justify the sacrifices; but they
are a substantial reinforcement to the
considerations that supply the actual
justifications.  We have won a new status among
the nations of the world; which is the
outward sign of that strong national spirit,
evoked by the war, which is to-day
vitalizing our common life in all its
manifestations—political, commercial, intellectual,
spiritual.  It is something, too, to have
learned in the sternest of tests, that we have
been building our nationhood on sound
lines; that our conception of a democratic
people, with equality of opportunity and
status, endures while autocracy, based upon
the subjection of man, has crumbled in the
fierce fires of war.  We know now that
everything that makes the normal and
happy citizen in peace—good schools in
youth, just living conditions, opportunities
for advancement to honest work, wise laws,
the cultivation of the spiritual life—makes
also the unconquerable soldier when he is
called upon to defend his home.  Canada
derives from the war the profound satisfaction
that she gave essential help in protecting
the world from a political and spiritual
reaction that would have set the clocks of
human progress back a thousand years; the
hope, still confident, that she has helped to
usher in a new international order under
which democratic institutions can have a
peaceful and fruitful evolution to better
things for all; and a knowledge of her own
capacities and possibilities which gives her
confidence to go forward to a great career
amongst the nations of the world.

The financial burdens of the war, heavy
though they be, need give us little concern.
They can be borne—or better still, largely
removed—if Canadians in grappling with
this problem, show, in any degree, the
qualities of patriotism, unity and sacrifice which
gave so sharp an edge to their war effort.
We all helped in the war but the actual
fighting was done by the men who could
fight.  We shall all help to carry the war
debt but most of the paying will have to be
done by those who can pay.  The war debt
may be no calamity whatever if we are
driven by necessity to juster methods of
taxation, greater co-ordination of national
energies and wise development of the
country's resources.

The hard question is where the recompense
is for the men who will never come
back—who rest in the countless cemeteries
which dot the battlefields of France.  The
answer—if answer there be—must be given
by fighting men themselves who counted in
advance the cost and accepted the price with
proud humility; let them speak!  Julian
Grenfell, before going into battle to his
death, put the case of the young man to
whom duty calls in two ever memorable
lines:

   |  "He is dead who will not fight,
   |  And who dies fighting has increase."
   |

The passion of man for his country which
makes death in her defence a high honor
burns in Vernede's "Petition"—a prayer
that was granted:

   |  "Grant thou one thing more;
   |  That now when envious foes would spoil thy splendor,
   |  Unversed in arms, a dreamer such as I
   |  May in thy ranks be deemed not all unworthy
   |  England, for thee to die."
   |

It must be a deep instinct, not to be judged
by finite tests, that sent the young men to
battle with joyous hearts and shining faces.
"Now God be thanked that has matched us
with His hour!" cried Rupert Brooke, now
asleep in Scyros in the far Aegean seas.  And
the stoicism with which the young soldier
foresaw death on the battlefield was never
expressed in finer terms than by the British
officer in the letter which he wrote to his
parents the night before his death:

"It is impossible to fear death out here
when one is no longer an individual but a
member of a regiment and an army.  I have
been looking at the stars and thinking what
an immense distance they are away.  What
an insignificant thing the loss of, say, 40
years of life is compared with them!  It
seems hardly worth talking about!"

Here are four voices, all now from the
shades!  Do they not, taken together, tell
us something of the high exaltation with
which the young hero makes his sacrifice.
He welcomes the hour that makes his arms
his country's shield, scorning the recreant
who shuns the test; and measuring time by
eternity he renounces life as a garment to be
laid aside.  If the poet and the seer can
speak for them, the lost do not ask us for
pity or for hopeless grief:

   |  "They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
   |    Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
   |  At the going down of the sun in the morning
   |    We will remember them."
   |

For those who mourn for the unreturning
brave there are secret springs of consolation!
The ending of the full-lived life is
not tragic; the symbol of poignant grief is
the broken column that bespeaks the day
that ended in the morning.  But for those
who die for their country there is not this
sense of irremediable loss, this feeling of
the unlived life, the unfulfilled dream.
There is an instinct deep-hidden in human
life which tells the mourner that for the
man who falls upon the field of honor his
life has come full circle whatever the tale
of his years; and that somewhere in the
divine scheme of things there is compensation
for the lost experiences and achievements.

If the dead gave their lives without
bitterness and the living are consoled Canada,
the common mother of both, is richer for
all time for their sacrifice.  In the life of
the race a single generation passes like a
heart-beat; but the chosen few from this
generation, whose names are in the lists of
the lost, are secure in their fame and in their
power.  They have set for all time for
Canada the standards of service and of sacrifice;
their example will, now and forever,
sweeten our civic life and if the occasion
calls will nerve the youth of Canada to
emulate their deeds on the stricken field.  A
thousand years from now Canadian youths
will read the story of their deeds with hearts
uplifted and with kindling eyes.  Safe in
such an immortality what matters it that
they sleep far from Canada upon the
battlefields of France!

.. vspace:: 3

.. class:: center small white-space-pre-line

   Warwick Bro's & Rutter, Limited,
   Printers and Bookbinders, Toronto, Canada

.. vspace:: 6

.. pgfooter::