Ypres, indeed, revealed the basic quality upon which the achievements of the Canadians in the field rested—that fortitude, moral and physical, which in the day of battle and the hour of trial triumphed over every human weakness and made them the implacable and irresistible vindicators of divine justice. In the early summer of 1918 when there was imminent danger of the whole western front being crushed under the weight of the German advance, Sir Arthur Currie, the commander of the Canadian corps, in a speech at a Canadian dinner in London, made a remark which shocked and thrilled his hearers. He said he was the proudest man in the world because he commanded the Canadian corps; and the saddest because it was doomed to die. Thus he gave notice that, if the line were overwhelmed, the Canadians would die fighting. That was the darkest hour that comes before the dawn. No such glorious but tragic fate awaited the Canadians. The future held for them not the guerdon of inexpugnable heroism in disaster but the bright badge of victory. When they struck camp and unfurled their banners for the new campaign they marched not to Thermopylae but to Waterloo. But much more than the capacity to conquer in the actual clash of the battlefield went to the making of the victorious Canadian army. These civilians, called from the bench, the office, the farm and the forest showed an aptitude for war—exemplified also in varying degrees by all the democratic armies—that must have seemed uncanny to the German High Command, hopelessly committed by training and inclination to the view that great and conquering armies could only be created in nations as the result of precedent and long-continuing conditions: among them the constant familiarizing of the popular mind with the idea of war as a weapon of national policy, the universal training of men of military age, the careful cultivation of an officer class, the maintenance of a general staff of highly equipped experts and strategists who devoted their lives to the art of war. Considering their environment and viewpoint it was inevitable that they should regard it as simply preposterous that a civilian army officered and commanded by men of their own type and class—farmers, artisans; clerks, bankers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, journalists, real estate agents—should be able to dispute the field with the disciplined legions of Germany. They could not realize what this war has established beyond all question, that the general principles upon which war is waged are simple and easily grasped.