It was a critical night for the Canadians. The Germans, realizing at last that the French trenches opposite their gas-cylinders were unoccupied, and that their experiment had succeeded beyond their widest hopes, had advanced, and were now threatening the Canadian flank. Advancing with the utmost gallantry, Geddes’s strange conglomeration of British and Canadian troops had succeeded in capturing by assault a small wood west of the village of St. Julien, in which four 4·7 guns--the 2nd London Heavy Battery--lent to the French some time before, had fallen into German hands. The 10th Canadian Regiment and the Canadian Highlanders made a most spectacular and splendid charge through the wood that night, routing the Germans and recapturing the guns. Unfortunately, the “heavies” could not be brought away, so the breech-blocks were removed and the guns otherwise rendered useless. That night the Canadians bent back their left flank against the attack they knew could not be long delayed. Indeed, reports showed the Germans to be busy outside their trenches. The Canadians dug themselves in along their new line whilst the dawn came creeping up heralding the day that was to win immortal glory for the Maple Leaf. They knew that they must hold out against the arrival of the British troops which were coming to reinforce them, and of the French reinforcements which were hastening up to try and regain what had been lost. It was at 4 a.m. that the gas was released. It came on in its sluggish rolling billows against the Canadians lined up behind their sandbags on the Gravenstafel ridge from a distance calculated by the Winnipeg Rifles (8th Canadian Battalion) to be about 200 yards. They had time to load and discharge two charges of their Ross rifles before the gas was on them, rolling over the parapet, creeping in and out of the sandbags and eddying into the dug-outs. Urgent messages were telephoned back to the batteries as the Germans were seen assembling in front of their main trench. The enemy waited ten minutes or so before attacking, and when they did come on were driven back by our guns and the rifles of the men who were still able to stand upright. For the Canadians stood fast. As long as the Empire endures the story of their fight shall live. Stifled like wasps in a nest, battered incessantly by a terrific bombardment which increased in intensity as the day wore on, they held out grimly. The Highlanders in the wood west of St. Julien, badly enfiladed, as the flank was bent back here, got the full blast of the vapours, but they would not fall back. At one place where part of one battalion was forced to evacuate their trench, the survivors made an extraordinarily plucky attempt to reoccupy it in the face of a withering fire.