Let us pause a minute here, and contemplate the work of this North Country Territorial Division. Landed in France on April 19, five days later the stout North Countrymen, the majority of whom were miners from Northumberland, Yorkshire, and Durham, were undergoing an ordeal of fire which tried the nerves of our hardiest veterans. They knew nothing of the country, they had had no practical experience of war. In the ordinary course of events they would have had a progressive course of acclimatization in the field before taking their turn of duty in the firing-line as a divisional unit. “Had they been only a couple of months in France,” a competent observer said to me after the battle, “their losses would not have been so heavy. There are things about this war which no amount of careful training at home can teach. But the need for reinforcements was imperative, and they had to go into the fight. They never flinched from their ordeal. They fought and died like men.” That was a Territorial division, if there ever was one, men of the same mould, of the same speech, mostly led by the men they were wont to follow in their civilian callings. In battle, says the old German song, a man must depend on himself. That is what the Northumbrian Division did. On them, the untried battalions of but five days’ active service, devolved the proud honour of serving the Empire as a homogeneous unit, and they did not shirk the call. The mind dwells with a thrill on the advance of those sturdy, thick-set fellows suddenly confronted with the most hideous side of modern war, yet accepting the ordeal stolidly, unflinchingly, with many a rough word of encouragement and comfort bandied from mouth to mouth in their broad northern speech. The abandonment of St. Julien had placed the Canadian right in a precarious position. Their position on the Gravenstafel ridge, which had now become the acute angle of the salient, was untenable. Another brigade of the Northumbrian Division having come up to their relief with great difficulty, the Canadians fell back on the night of the 26th to behind the Hannabeek stream. Alter that the Canadian Division was withdrawn, its place being taken by the Lahore Division, part of the 4th Division, and the Northumbrian Division.