--A wrestling fight in the mud--Germans "try it on" the
Canadians--"The limit" in artillery fire--Maple Leaf spirit--Baseball
talk on the firing line--A good sprinkling of Americans.

One day the Canadians were to lift their feet out of the mire of the
Ypres salient and take the high, dry road to the Somme front, and anyone
with a whit of chivalry in his soul would have rejoiced to know that
they were to have their part in the big movement of Sept. 15th. But let
us consider other things and other fighting before we come to the taking
of Courcelette.

When I was home in the winter of 1915-16, for the first time the border
between the United States and Canada drew a line in sharp contrasts. The
newspapers in Canada had their casualty lists, parents were giving their
sons and wives their husbands to go three thousand miles to endure
hardship and risk death for a cause which to them had no qualifications
of a philosophic internationalism. Everything was distinct. Sacrifice
and fortitude, life and death, and the simple meaning words were masters
of the vocabulary.

Some people might ask why Canada should be pouring out her blood in
Europe; what had Flanders to do with her? England was fighting to save
her island, France for the sanctity of her soil, but what was Canada
fighting for? As I understood it, she was fighting for Canada. A blow
had been struck against her, though it was struck across the Atlantic,
and across the Atlantic she was going to strike back.

She had had no great formative war. Pardeburg was a kind of expedition
of brave men, like the taking of San Juan Hill. It did not sink deep
into the consciousness of the average Canadian, who knew only that some
neighbor of his had been in South Africa. Our own formative war was the
Revolution, not the Civil War where brother fought brother. The
Revolution made a mold which, perhaps, instead of being impressed upon
succeeding generations of immigrants may have only given a veneer to
them. A war may be necessary to make them molten for another shaping.

No country wanted war less than Canada, but when war came its flame made
Canada molten with Canadian patriotism. As George III. brought the
Carolinas and Massachusetts together, so the Kaiser has brought the
Canadian provinces together. The men from that cultivated, rolling
country of Southern Ontario, from New Brunswick and the plains and the
coast and a quota from the neat farms of Quebec have met face to