r. Except the Anzacs, they were
the most audacious army in Europe. They had become great in defiance
of red tape, insisting on whatever is called Canadianism. They
embodied all there was of Western independence on that Front. The
Anzacs, great in fight and in ideas of personal liberty, had not been
welded into such a machine as the Canadians, whose advertised national
qualities Currie was expected to conserve.

"As soon as one lets the cheeky beggars, Canadians from America, have a
bit of quiet, they get uppish," was the illuminating sentence in a
letter found in a German trench near St. Eloi. Currie knew those
"cheeky beggars". In his own elephantine way he loved them, when few
of them could figure it out. He knew how hard those "beggars" could
hit: how grimly they could stick: how madly they could raid and rush:
how infernally they could scheme to "put one over on Heine"; how
desperately they could abuse earth and heaven when they had time in the
rest billets to smoke fags and write letters home. They were no army
to go whacking on the shoulder.

It had been all right for Byng the Briton to go among those men with
three buttons loose. Men like a touch of insurgency in a commander who
has come up among the martinets. Byng was a professional soldier.
Currie was not yet even a mild insurgent, or was not known as such to
the ranks. He was almost a man of prayer. He moved in a large arc
somewhat like his great resolute body; an engine of might that never
seemed weary; who at "Molly-be-Damned" studied battle reports at two
a.m., and was in the field at six. As he had almost come up from the
ranks, the men knew him. Here and there in a British Columbia
battalion may have been a man who had bought a corner lot from Currie
in Victoria. If so, he liked to talk about the hard-up days of the
Corps Commander when he was in real estate.

Currie knew that above all things he must keep the confidence of those
men and that he could never do it by familiarity. Success was the only
way. Not, anyhow, speeches. The C.C. was rather fond of talking aloud
at first; sometimes too religiously. It was a habit that he never
quite abandoned, though he changed his style as he grew in experience.

There was work to do. No army had more; few armies as much. Currie's
was a mobile army; needed as shock troops in rough places--a very good
reputation if not too much of it. There was danger of the army losing
its Canadianism by