the first battle of Ypres when the British high command, denuded
of shells, were allotting among their commands, then engaged in a
life-and-death struggle, ammunition which had not yet left England.
So terribly was the "first seven divisions" of glorious memory
decimated in this first battle of Ypres, that at a critical time,
the bakers, cobblers and grooms were put into the trenches to fill
the gaps made by the slain soldiers in that great charnel house.
The "thin red line" held back--not for days, but for weeks,--an
immensely superior force, and the soldiers of England unflinchingly
bared their breasts to the most destructive artillery-fire that
the world at that time had ever known. They held their ground and
saved the day, and the glory of the first and second battles of
Ypres, which saved Calais, and possibly the war itself, will ever
be that of the British Army.

Over four million Britons have volunteered in the war, and although
very few of them had ever had an previous military experience, yet
their stamina and unconquerable courage were such that the youth
of the great Empire, on more than one occasion, when called upon,
as on the Somme, to attack as well as defend, swept the famed Prussian
guard out of seemingly impregnable positions, as for example at
Contalmaison.

Will the world ever forget the children of the Mother Empire who
came so freely and nobly from far distant Canada, who wrenched Vimy
and Messines ridges from a powerful foe?

I hear still the tramp of marching thousands in the first days of
the war, as they passed through the streets of Winchester en route
to France via Southampton, singing with cheer and joy, "It is a