The Germans got possession of a section of the P. P’s’ trench where, it is believed, no Canadians were left. But the German effort died there. It could get no farther. This was as near to Ypres as the Germans were to go in this direction. When the day’s work was done and there in sight of the field scattered with German dead, the P. P’s counted their numbers. Of the 635 men who had begun the fight at daybreak one hundred and fifty men and four officers, Niven, Papineau, Clark and Vandenberg, remained fit for duty. Papineau is a young lawyer of Montreal, who had already won the Military Cross for bombing Germans out of a sap at St. Eloi. Vandenberg is a Dutchman--but mostly he is Vandenberg. To him the call of youth is the call to arms. He knows the roads of Europe and the roads of Chihuahua. He was at home fighting with Villa at Zacatecas and at home fighting with the P. P’s in front of Ypres. Darkness found all the survivors among the P. P’s in the support and communication trenches. The fire trench had become an untenable dust-heap. They crept out only to bring in any wounded unable to help themselves; and wounded and rescuers were more than once hit in the process. It was too dangerous to attempt to bury the dead, who were in the fire trench. Most of them had already been buried by shells. For them and for the dead in the support trenches interred by their living comrades Niven recited such portions as he could recall of the Church of England service for the dead--recited them with a tight throat. Then the P. P’s, unbeaten, marched out, leaving the position to their relief, a battalion of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. Eighteen hundred strong they had come out to France; and after they had repulsed German charges in the midst of shells that mauled their trenches at Hooge on that indescribable day of May 8th, one hundred and fifty were able to bear arms and little Lieutenant Niven, polo player and horseman, who had entered as a private, was in command. Corporal Christy, bear-hunter of the Northwest, who could “shoot the eyes off an ant,” by some miracle had escaped without a scratch. All the praise that the P. P’s, millionaire or labourer, scapegrace or respectable pillar of society, ask is that they were worthy of fighting side by side with Mr. Thomas Atkins, regular. At best one poor little finite mind only observes through a rift in the black smoke and yellow smoke of high explosives and the clouds of dust and military secrecy something of what has happened in a small section of that long line from Switzerland to the North Sea many times; and this is given here. Leaning against the wall in a corner of the dining-room of the French château were the P. P’s’ colours. Major Niven took off the wrapper in order that I might see the flag with the initials of the battalion which Princess Patricia embroidered with her own hands. There’s room, one repeats, for a little sentiment and a little emotion, too, between Halifax and Vancouver.