It was in their first trenches that I saw them, and they were "on the job, all right," in face of scattered shell-fire and the sweep of searchlights and 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." They may have lacked the etiquette of discipline of British regulars, but they had the natural discipline of self-reliance and of "go to it" when a crisis came. This trench was only an introduction, a preparation for a thing which was about as real as ever fell to the lot of any soldiers. It is not for me to tell here the story of their part in the second battle of Ypres, when the gas fumes rolled in upon them. I should like to tell it and also the story of the deeds of many British regiments, from the time of Mons to Festubert. All Canada knows it in detail from their own correspondents and their record officer. England will one day know about her regiments; her stubborn regiments of the line, her county regiments, who have won the admiration of all the crack regiments, whether English or Scots. "When that gas came along," said one Canadian, who expressed the Canadian spirit, "we knew the Boches were springing a new one on us. You know how it is if a man is hit in the face by a cloud of smoke when he is going into a burning building to get somebody out. He draws back--and then he goes in. We went in. We charged--well, it was the way we felt about it. We wanted to get at them and we were boiling mad over such a dastardly kind of attack." Higher authorities than any civilian have testified to how that charge helped, if it did not save, the situation. And then at Givenchy--straight work into the enemy's trenches under the guns. Canada is part of the British Empire and a precious part; but the Canadians, all imperial politics aside, fought their way into the affection of the British army, if they did not already possess it. They made the Rocky Mountains seem more majestic and the Thousand Islands more lovely. If there are some people in the United States busy with their own affairs who look on the Canadians as living up north somewhere toward the Arctic Circle and not very numerous, that old criterion of worth which discovers in the glare of battle's publicity merit which already existed has given to the name Canadian a glory which can be appreciated only with the perspective of time. The Civil War left us a martial tradition; they have won theirs. Some day a few of their neutral neighbours who fought by their side will be joining in their army reunions and remarking, "Wasn't that mud in Flanders------" etc.