It was not cheering news to learn that the regiments on his left had withdrawn to trenches about three hundred yards to the rear—­a long distance in trench warfare.  But the P.P.s had no time to retire.  They could have gone only in the panic of men who think of nothing in their demoralization except to flee from the danger in front, regardless of more danger to the rear.  They were held where they were under what cover they had by the renewed blasts of shells, putting the machine-guns out of action.

Now the Germans were coming on again in their supreme effort.  It was as a nightmare, in which only the objective of effort is recalled and all else is a vague struggle of every ounce of strength which one can exert against smothering odds.  No use to ask these men what they thought.  What do you think when you are climbing up a rope whose strands are breaking over the edge of a precipice?  You climb; that is all.

The P.P.s shot at Germans.  After a night without sleep, after a day among their dead and wounded, after torrents of shell-fire, after breathing smoke, dust and gas, these veterans were in a state of exaltation entirely oblivious of danger, of their surroundings, mindless of what came next, automatically shooting to kill as they were trained to do, even as a man pulls with all his might in the crucial test of a tug of war.  Old Corporal Christy, bear-hunter of the North-West, who could “shoot the eye off an ant,” as Niven said, leaned out over the parapet, or what was left of it, because he could take better aim lying down and the Germans were so thick that he could not afford any misses.

Corporal Dover had to give up firing his machine-gun at last.  Wounded, he had dug it out of the earth after an explosion and set it up again.  The explosion which destroyed the gun finally crushed his leg and arm.  He crawled out of the debris toward the support trench which had become the fire trench, only to be killed by a bullet.

The Germans got possession of a section of the P.P.s’ trench where, it is believed, no Canadians were left.  But the German effort died there.  It could get no farther.  This was as near to Ypres as the Germans were to go in this direction.  When the day’s work was done, there, in sight of the field scattered with German dead, the P.P.s counted their numbers.  Of the six hundred and thirty-five men who had begun the fight at daybreak, one hundred and fifty men and four officers, Niven, Pappineau, Clark and Vandenberg, remained fit for duty.

Vandenberg is a Hollander, but mostly he is Vandenberg.  To him the call of youth is the call to arms.  He knows the roads of Europe and the roads of Chihuahua.  He was at home fighting with Villa at Zacetecas and at home fighting with the P.P.s in front of Ypres.