d, a regimental and a battalion
commander. The senior was a baron--one cannot leave him out of any
narrative--and inclined to bear himself with patrician contempt toward
the Canadian democracy, which is a mistake for barons in his situation
with every Canadian more or less of a king that day. When he tried to
start his men into a revolt his hosts acted promptly, with the result
that the uprising was nipped in the bud and the baron was shot through
the leg, leaving him still "fractious and patronizing." Then the little
colonel of the French-Canadians said, "I think I might as well shoot you
in a more vital part and have done with it!" or something equally to the
point and suddenly the baron became quite democratic himself.

One of the battalions that took Courcelette was French-Canadian. No
other Canadian battalion will deny them the glory that they won that
day, and it must have been irritating to the German baron to surrender
superior numbers to the stocky type that we see in New England factory
towns and on their farms in Quebec, for they now formed the battalion,
the frontiersmen, the _courrier de bois_, having been mostly killed in
the salient. Shall I forget that little private, forty years old if he
were a day, with a hole from shrapnel in his steel helmet and the bit
of purple and white ribbon worn proudly on his breast, who, when I asked
him how he felt after he received the clout from a shell-fragment,
remarked blandly that it had knocked him down and made his head ache!

"You have the military cross!" I said.

"Yais, sir. I'm going to win the Victoria Cross!" he replied, saluting.
Talk about "the spirit that quickeneth!"

Or, shall I forget the French-Canadian colonel telling his story of how
he and the battalion on his left in equal difficulties held the line
beyond Courcelette with his scattered men against thirteen
counter-attacks that night; how he had to go from point to point
establishing his posts in the dark, and his repeated "'I golly!" of
wonder at how he had managed to hold on, with its ring of naive
unrealization of the humor of being knocked over by a shell and finding,
"'I golly!" that he had not been hurt! They had not enlisted freely, the
French-Canadians, but those who had proved that if the war emotion had
taken hold of them as it had of the rest of Canada they would not have
been found wanting.

"'I golly!" they had to fight from the very fact that there were only a
few to strike for ol