but to trust
to a better fortune which should draft us into a battalion going soon to
the fighting front.

The First Brigade consisted of men of the First, Second, Third and Fourth
Battalions of Infantry. All of these battalions came from Ontario. The
Second Brigade was made up of men from the West, including Winnipeg,
Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary and Vancouver. They were in the Fifth, Seventh,
Eighth and Tenth Battalions, all infantry.

The Third Brigade was commonly known as the Highland Brigade and was made
up of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth and Sixteenth Battalions. This
last brigade included such splendid old regiments as the Forty-Eighth
Highlanders of Toronto, the Ninety-First Highlanders of Hamilton and
Vancouver, and the Black Watch of Montreal. There were also some of the far
eastern men in this brigade.

After all this rearrangement had been made, it was only a few days till
the rumor flew about that the battalions might leave for France at any time
now. It seemed to us poor devils of the old Ninth that everything was going
wrong. The unit lying next to us, the Seventeenth Battalion, was
quarantined with that terrible disease, cerebro-spinal-meningitis. For a
few days we buried our lads by the dozen. Speaking for myself, my nerves
were absolutely unstrung, and I am sure that most of the men were in the
same condition. It can be easily understood then that when drafts were
asked for, to bring up the regiments leaving for France to full strength,
there was a mad scramble to get away.

Without even passing the surgeon, I finally drifted into the Third
Battalion, ordinarily known as the "Dirty Third." This battalion was made
up of the Queen's Own, the Bodyguards and Grenadier Regiments of Toronto.

I landed in on a Sunday afternoon about three o'clock and was immediately
told by the quartermaster that we were leaving for France in a few hours.
He told me that I needed a complete change of equipment. At this news I
rejoiced, because so far we had all worn, in our battalion, the leather
harness known as the "Oliver torture." I knew that the active service, or
web, equipment could not be worse.

The rush for equipment issue was like a melee on the front line after a
charge, as I found out later on. There were some three hundred men newly
drafted into the Third Battalion; there were some three hours in which we
had to get our equipment and learn to adjust it. As it was, many of the
extreme greenhorn type