Canadian or Australian soldier had landed in France.

But that is only the first, though in some ways the greatest, chapter
in this bloodstained book. Memory runs on nearly six months, and we
come to that awful April afternoon, when the French line broke under
the first German gas attack, and the Canadians on their right held on
through two days and nights, gassed and shelled, suffering frightful
casualties, but never yielding, till the line was safe, and fresh
troops had come up. It was not six weeks since at Neuve Chapelle the
Canadians had for the first time, while not called on to take much
active part themselves, seen the realities of European battle; and the
cheers of the British troops at Ypres as the exhausted Dominion troops
came back from the trenches will live in history.

Messines, and the victory of June, 1917--Passchendaele, and the losses
of that grim winter--all the points indeed of this dim horizon from
north-west to south-east have their imperishable meaning for Great
Britain and the Dominions. For quite apart from the main actions which
stand out, fighting and death never ceased in the Ypres salient.

Then, as the great Army of the gallant dead seemed to gather round one
on this famous road, and over these shell-torn flats, a sudden
recollection of a letter which I received in August, 1918, brought a
tightening of the throat. A Canadian lady, writing from an American
camp in the east of France, appealed to myself and other writers to do
something to bring home to the popular mind of America a truer
knowledge of what the British Armies had done in the war. "I see
here," says the writer, "hundreds of the finest remaining white men on
earth every week. They are wonderful military material, and very
attractive and lovable boys. But it discourages all one's hope for the