All I asked of the Canadians was to allow a little of the glory they had won--they had won such a lot--to rub off on their neighbours. If there must be war, and no Canadian believed in it as an institution, why, to my mind, the Canadians did a fine thing for civilisation’s sake. It hurt sometimes to think that we also could not be in the fight for the good cause, too, particularly after the _Lusitania_ was sunk, when my own feelings had lost all semblance to neutrality. The Canadians enlivened life at the front; for they have a little more zip to them than the thoroughgoing 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 highstrung the Canadian born, quick to see and 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 but mud in an English winter to fight. One from the American continent 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 had their guns and equipment ready. 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 first saw them, and they were “on the job, all right,” in face of scattered shell-fire and the sweep of the searchlights and the 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.”