wledge, ingenuity and unlimited resources upon the
construction of a system of defence by means of which they hoped to defy
the world, and upon which when completed they displayed the vaunting
challenge, "We are ready for you; come on!"

In that great conflict there was no element of surprise. It was a
deliberate testing out of strength, physical and moral. For the first
time in the war the British army stood upon something like even terms
in manpower and in weight of metal, with, however, the immense handicap
still resting upon it that it was the attacking force. The result
settled forever the question of the fighting quality of the races. When
the first day's fight was done, on a battle front of twenty miles the
British armies had smashed a hole seven miles wide, while their gallant
allies, fighting on an eight-mile front, had captured the whole line.
In two weeks' time, the seven-mile hole was widened to ten. Fortified
villages, entrenched redoubts, woods stuffed with guns, great and small,
had gone down before that steady, relentless, crushing advance. The
full significance of the Somme had not dawned as yet upon the world. The
magnitude of the achievement was not yet estimated, but already names
hitherto unknown were flung up flaming into the world's sky in letters
of eternal fire, Ovillers, Mametz Wood, Trones Wood, Langueval, Mouquet
Farm, Deville Wood for the British, with twenty-one thousand prisoners,
and Hardecourt, Dompierre, Becquin-Court, Bussu and Fay for the French
allies, with thirty-one thousand prisoners.

On that line of carefully chosen and elaborately fortified defences, the
proudest of Germany's supermen of war had been beaten at their own game
by the civilian soldiers of "effete and luxury loving Britain," and the
republican armies of "decadent France," and still the Homeric fight was
raging. Foot by foot, yard by yard, the Hun was fighting to hold the
line which should make good his insolent claim to the hegemony of the
world. Step by step, yard by yard, that line was being torn from his
bloody fingers. Into that sea of fire and blood, the Canadians were to
plunge. They remembered Langemarck and Sanctuary Wood and St. Eloi, and
were not unwilling to make the plunge. They thought of those long
months in The Salient, when the ruthless Hun from his vantage ground of
overwhelming superiority had poured his deadly hail from right flank,
left flank, front and rear, upon them, holding, suffering, dying