My thanks to the Canadians for being at the front. They brought me back to the plains and the Northwest, and they showed the Germans on some occasions what a blizzard is like when expressed in bullets instead of in snowflakes, by men who know how to shoot. I had continental pride in them. They had the dry, pungent philosophy and the indomitable optimism which the air of the plains and the St. Lawrence Valley seems to develop. They were not afraid to be a little emotional and sentimental. There is room for that sort of thing between Vancouver and Halifax. They had been in some “tough scraps” which they saw clear-eyed, as they would see a boxing-match or a spill from a canoe into a Canadian rapids. As for the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, all old soldiers of the South African campaign almost without exception, knowing and hardened, their veteran experience gave them an earlier opportunity in the trenches than the first Canadian division. Brigaded with British regulars, the Princess Pats were a sort of _corps d’élite_. Colonel Francis Farquhar, known as “Fanny,” was their colonel, and he knew his men. After he was killed his spirit remained with them. Asked if they could stick, they said, “Yes, sir!” cheerily, as he would have wanted them to say it. I am going to tell you about the work of the Princess Pats on May 8th, not to single them out from any other regiment, but because it is typical of the kind of fighting which many another regiment has known and I have it in illustrative detail. Losses, day by day losses, characteristic of trench warfare, they had previously suffered in holding a difficult salient at St. Eloi--losses that added up into the hundreds. Heretofore as one of them said, they had been holding down the lid of hell, but on May 8th they were to hold on to the edge of the opening by the skin of their teeth and look down into the bowels of hell after the Germans had blown off the lid with high explosives. It was in a big château that I first heard the story and felt the thrill of it told by the tongues of its participants. There were twenty bedrooms in that château. If I wished to stay all night I might occupy three or four--and as for that bathroom, paradise to men who have been buried in filthy mud by high explosives, the Frenchman who planned it had the most spacious ideas in immersions. A tub or a shower or a hose as you pleased. Some bathroom, that! For nothing in the British army was too good for the Princess Pats before May 8th; and since May 8th nothing was quite good enough. Five of us sat down to dinner in a banquet hall looking out on a private park, big enough to hold fifty. The talk ran fast.