On the afternoon of the 22nd of April the Germans projected their first attack of asphyxiating gas against a point of our Allies' front. Turcos and Zouaves fell back, strangled, blinded and dismayed. The British left was exposed. A four-mile gap--a way to Calais--lay open to the enemy. The 1st Canadian Division, the only Canadian Division in the field in those early days, held the British left. It blocked the four-mile gap and held up Germany, gas and all. There were no such things as gas masks in those days; but the Canadians were undismayed by that new and terrific form of murder. They had left their offices and shops, their schools and farms and mills, with the intention of fighting the Hun, and, in return, of suffering the worst he could do to them. They did not expect him to fight like a sportsman, or even like a human being. So they accepted the gas as part of the day's work. It was the last day's work for hundreds of those good workmen. A battery of Canadian 18-pounders, commanded by Major W. B. M. King, C.F.A., maintained its original position well into the second day of the battle--the 23rd of April. The gunners were supported by a depleted Company of the 14th (Royal Montreal) Battalion, and kept up their fire on the approaching Germans until their final rounds were crashed into "the brown" of the massed enemy at a range of less than two hundred yards. This is a class of performance which seems to make a particular appeal to the hearts of gunners. It calls for more than steadiness and desperate courage, for technical difficulties in the matter of timing the fuses to a fraction of a second must be overcome under conditions peculiarly adverse to the making of exact mathematical calculations. But this sort of thing is frequently done--always with gusto and sometimes with the loss of the guns and the lives of their crews. The gunner then feels all the primitive excitement of the infantryman in a bayonet charge. He claps his gun, that complicated, high-priced and prodigious weapon, at the very head of the enemy, as if it were no more than a pistol. On this occasion the guns were not lost. They were extricated from beneath the very boots and bayonets of the enemy and withdrawn to open fire again from a more secure position and at a more customary range. They were "man-handled" out and back by the survivors of their own crews and of the supporting company of infantry; but all those heroic and herculean efforts would have availed nothing if Corporal Fisher had not played his part.