When on the way back to quarters you passed some of the New Army men, “the Keetcheenaires,” as the French call them, you were reminded of how, although the war was old, the British army was young. There was a “Watch our city grow!” atmosphere about it. Little by little, some great force seems steadily pushing up from the rear. It made that business institution at G. H. Q. feel like bankers with an enormous, increasing surplus. In this the British is like no other army. One has watched it in the making. XXV THE MAPLE LEAF FOLK Canadians at the front--Home folks to the American--One touch of New York slang--Hustlers--The discipline of self-reliance-- Charging through gas--Our bond with the Canadians--Their optimism and sentiment--The Princess Pats--Holding down the lid of hell--The second battle of Ypres--The Story of May Eighth--Holding a salient--The Germans prepare to attack-- The marksmen of the P. P’s--Down go the Germans--The attack broken--Official record of the struggle--Machine guns buried-- Reinforcements and ammunition--The third and severest charge-- Seventy-five per cent. casualties--The P. P’s, “regulars”-- Modern knights. These were home folks to the American. You might know all by their maple leaf symbol; but even before you saw that, with its bronze none too prominent against the khaki, you knew those who were not recent emigrants from England to Canada by their accent and by certain slang phrases which pay no customs duty at the border. When, on a dark February night cruising in a slough of a road, I heard out of a wall of blackness back of the trenches, “Gee! Get onto the bus!” which referred to our car, and also, “Cut out the noise!” I was certain that I might dispense with an interpreter. After I had remarked that I came from New York, which is only across the street from Montreal as distances go in our countries, the American batting about the front at midnight was welcomed with a “glad hand” across that imaginary line which has and ever shall have no fortresses. What a strange place to find Canadians--at the front in Europe! I could never quite accommodate myself to the wonder of a man from Winnipeg, and perhaps a “neutral” from Wyoming in his company, fighting Germans in Flanders. A man used to a downy couch and an easy-chair by the fire and steam-heated rooms, who had ten thousand a year in Toronto, when you found him in a chill, damp cellar of a peasant’s cottage in range of the enemy’s shells was getting something more novel, if not more picturesque, than dog-mushing and prospecting on the Yukon; for that contrast we are quite used to.