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 future unity and friendship between us all to realise as I have done the last few months that the majority of these men are entering the fight, firmly believing that 'England has not done her share--that France had done it all--the Colonials have done all the hard fighting, etc.'" And she proceeds to attribute the state of things to the "belittling reports" of England's share in the war given in the newspapers which reach these "splendid men" from home. A similar statement has come to me within the last few days, in another letter from an English lady in an American camp near Verdun, who speaks of the tragic ignorance--for tragic it is when one thinks of all that depends on Anglo-American understanding in the future!--shown by the young Americans in the camp where she is at work, of the share of Great Britain in the war.