The Canadians enlivened life at the front; for they have a little more zip to them than the thorough-going British.  Their climate spells “hustle,” and we are all the product of climate to a large degree, whether in England, on the Mississippi flatlands, or in Manitoba.  Eager and high-strung the Canadian born, quick to see and to act.  Very restless they were when held up on Salisbury Plain, after they had come three-four-five-six thousand miles to fight and there was nothing to fight but mud in an English winter.

One from the American contingent knew what ailed them; they wanted action.  They may have seemed undisciplined to a drill sergeant; but the kind of discipline they needed was a sight of the real thing.  They wanted to know, What for?  And Lord Kitchener was kinder to them, though many were beginners, than to his own new army; he could be, as they were ready with guns and equipment.  So he sent them over to France before it was too late in the spring to get frozen feet from standing in icy water looking over a parapet at a German parapet.  They liked Flanders mud better than Salisbury Plain mud, because it meant that there was “something doing.”

It was in their first trenches that I saw them, and they were “on the job, all right,” in face of scattered shell-fire and the sweep of searchlights and flares.  They had become the most ardent of pupils, for here was that real thing which steadied them and proved their metal.

They refashioned their trenches and drained them with the fastidiousness of good housekeepers who had a frontiersman’s experience for an inheritance.  In a week they appeared to be old hands at the business.

“Their discipline is different from ours,” said a British general, “but it works out.  They are splendid.  I ask for no better troops.”

They may have lacked the etiquette of discipline of British regulars, but they had the natural discipline of self-reliance and of “go to it” when a crisis came.  This trench was only an introduction, a preparation for a thing which was about as real as ever fell to the lot of any soldiers.  It is not for me to tell here the story of their part in the second battle of Ypres, when the gas fumes rolled in upon them.  I should like to tell it and also the story of the deeds of many British regiments, from the time of Mons to Festubert.  All Canada knows it in detail from their own correspondents and their record officer.  England will one day know about her regiments; her stubborn regiments of the line, her county regiments, who have won the admiration of all the crack regiments, whether English or Scots.

“When that gas came along,” said one Canadian, who expressed the Canadian spirit, “we knew the Boches were springing a new one on us.  You know how it is if a man is hit in the face by a cloud of smoke when he is going into a burning building to get somebody out.  He draws back—­and then he goes in.  We went in.  We charged—­well, it was the way we felt about it.  We wanted to get at them and we were boiling mad over such a dastardly kind of attack.”