e recovered the ruins, forcing the
party of the first part who had started the "show" back to his own
former first line trench, which left the situation as it was before with
both sides a loser of lives without gaining any ground and with the
prospect of drudgery in building anew their traverses and burrows and
filling new sandbags.

It was the repetition of this sort of "incident," as reported in the
daily _communiques_, which led the outside world to wonder at the
fatuousness and the satire of the thing, without understanding that its
object was entirely for the purpose of _morale_. An attack was made to
keep the men up to the mark; a counter-attack in order not to allow the
enemy ever to develop a sense of superiority. Every soldier who
participated in a charge learned something in method and gained
something in the quality considered requisite by his commanders. He had
met face to face in mortal hand-to-hand combat in the trench traverses
the enemy who had been some invisible force behind a gray line of
parapet sniping at him every time he showed his head.

Attack and counter-attack without adding another square yard to the
territory in your possession--these had cost hundreds of thousands of
casualties on the Western front. The next step was to obtain the
_morale_ of attack without wasting lives in trying to hold new ground.

Credit for the trench raid, which was developed through the winter of
1915, belongs to the Canadian. His plan was as simple as that of the
American Indian who rushed a white settlement and fled after he was
through scalping; or the cowboys who shot up a town; or the Mexican
insurgents who descend upon a village for a brief visit of killing and
looting. The Canadian proposed to enter the German trenches by surprise,
remain long enough to make the most of the resulting confusion, and then
to return to his own trenches without trying to hold and organize the
enemy's position and thus draw upon his head while busy with the spade a
murderous volume of shell fire.

The first raids were in small parties over a narrow front and the
tactics those of the frontiersman, who never wants in individual
initiative and groundcraft. Behind their lines the Canadians rehearsed
in careful detail again and again till each man was letter perfect in
the part that he was to play in the "little surprise being planned in
Canada for Brother Boche." The time chosen for the exploit was a dark,
stormy night, when the dr