he emerged as calm and smooth and pink as ever. . . . The day the
newspapermen saw him a very junior officer who has since distinguished
himself came to report breathlessly, 'That last one, sir, got my tent!'
He was excited and just a trifle hysterical; but two words from the
General seemed to calm him at once. 'That so?' he said, with the same
quiet interest that a farmer might have received news that a certain
hen had at last laid an egg. 'I thought that last one sounded a bit
close.'"

Then there came to the head of the Canadian Corps a man named Byng, who
could stroll casually into a billet or a training field to inspect "the
muddy trench hounds" in canvas leggings and with three buttons loose.
Until Byng came the Canadian Corps was a semi-disciplined and
marvellous mob of men who could swear as hard as they could fight and
fight like wildcats. Byng gave then the massive and complex mechanism
of an army competent to conduct operations as a unit of modern war,
dominated by the man of whom the boys sang to the tune of Three Blind
Mice, "Byng Bangs Boche, See how they run!" Currie, commander of the
2nd Division, had seen this Corps Commander stroll into a billet and
hurl machine gun questions at the men who jumped like eager school-boys
to answer. He must have silently envied this genius, who cared far
less than he knew about what was wrong in a kit inspection, but had a
shrewd eye for manoeuvres. Not often in actual war does a man so
personally popular organize a cross-section of a vast international
country into a war machine called an army, and not seldom do men when
they hear of such a commander being transferred look at one another in
a sort of blank dismay and say, "Well, I'll be damned. Now who's it?"

Out of the army came slowly and ponderously the huge Highlander, with
the "baby pink face" and the rumbling gong of a voice.

Sir Arthur Currie was much too honest to imagine that he or any other
man could make the Canadian army. It was a heavy ordeal to follow
Byng, just as it had been easy for Byng to succeed Alderson. But
Currie knew the Canadians down at the root better than Byng knew them.
He knew how that army had been made: that he was taking over a
humanized machine that was to war in 1917 what the sword of Wallace had
been in man-to-man combat seven hundred years earlier. He knew the
weakness of men for idolizing a popular commander. They never would
parody any nursery rhyme in his honou