any stood watching them away, Phyllis in the
bow, not paddling, sat with her face toward them, Barry swinging his
paddle with graceful, powerful strokes, until just at a curve of the
shore, where some birches overhung the water, he swung the canoe half
round, and with paddle held Voyageur fashion in salute, they passed out
of sight.

CHAPTER XIX

THE PILOT'S LAST PORT

The little Canadian army was done with The Salient. The British
tradition established in the third month of the war, in that first
terrific twenty-two days' fight by Ypres, that that deadly convex should
be no thoroughfare to Calais for the Hun, was passed on with The Salient
into Canadian hands in the early months of 1915. How the little Canadian
army preserved the tradition and barred "the road-hog of Europe" from
the channel coast for seventeen months, let history tell, and at what
cost let the dead declare who lie in unmarked graves which, following
the curving line of trenches from Langemarck through Hooge and Sanctuary
Wood over Observation Ridge to St. Eloi, and the dead under those little
crosses that crowd the cemeteries of The Salient and of the clearing
stations in the rear, and the living as well, who through life will
carry the burden of enfeebled and mutilated bodies.

For seventeen months the Canadians in shallow dugouts and behind flimsy
trenches endured the maddening pounding of the Huns' guns, big and
little, without the satisfaction of reprisal, except in raid or
counter-attack, suffering the loss of two-thirds of their entire force,
but still holding. Now at length came the welcome release. They were
ordered to the Somme. Welcome not simply because of escape from an
experience the most trying to which an army could be subjected, but
welcome chiefly because there was a chance of fighting back.

They had no illusions about that great battle area of the south, echoes
of whose titanic struggle had reached them, but they longed for a chance
to get back at their foe. Besides, the Somme challenged their fighting
spirit. That glorious assault of the first of July of the allied
armies which flung them upon the scientifically prepared, embattled
and entrenched "German Frontier," with its fortified villages, its gun
stuffed woods, its massed parks of artillery, and defended by highly
disciplined and superbly organised soldiery, stirred them like a bugle
call. For two years the master war-makers of the world had employed
scientific kno