How deeply this Ypres salient enters into the war-consciousness of Britain and the Empire!  As I stand looking over the black stretches of riddled earth, at the half-demolished pill-boxes in front, at the muddy pools in the shell-holes under a now darkening sky; at the flat stretches between us and Kemmel where lie Zillebeke and St. Eloi, and a score of other names which will be in the mouth of history hundreds of years hence, no less certainly than the names of those little villages north and south of Thermopylae, which saw the advance of the Persians and the vigil of the Greeks—­a confusion of things read and heard, rush through one’s mind, taking new form and vividness from this actual scene in which they happened.  There, at those cross roads, broke the charge of the Worcesters, on that most critical day of all in the First Battle of Ypres, when the fate of the Allies hung on a thread, and this “homely English regiment,” with its famous record in the Peninsula and elsewhere, drove back the German advance and saved the line.  I turn a little to the south and I am looking towards Klein Zillebeke where the Household Cavalry charged, and Major Hugh Dawnay at their head “saved the British position,” and lost his own gallant life.  Straight ahead of us, down the Menin road towards Gheluvelt, came the Prussian Guards, the Emperor’s own troops with their master’s eye on them, on November 11th, when the First Division in General Haig’s First Corps, checked them, enfiladed them, mowed them down, till the flower of the Imperial troops fell back in defeat, never knowing by how small a fraction they had missed victory, how thin a line had held them, how little stood between them and the ports that fed the British Army.  Here on these flats to my right were Lord Cavan’s Guards, and on either side of him General Allenby’s cavalry, and General Byng’s; while, if one turns to the north towards the distance which hides Sonnebeke and Bixschoote, one is looking over the ground so magnificently held on our extreme left by General Dubois and his 9th French Corps.

Guards, Yorkshires, Lancashires, London Scottish, Worcesters, Royal Scots Fusiliers, Highlanders, Gordons, Leicesters—­all the familiar names of the old Army are likend with this great story.  It was an English and Scotch victory, the victory of these Islands, won before the “rally of the Empire” had time to develop, before a single Canadian or Australian soldier had landed in France.

But that is only the first, though in some ways the greatest, chapter in this bloodstained book.  Memory runs on nearly six months, and we come to that awful April afternoon, when the French line broke under the first German gas attack, and the Canadians on their right held on through two days and nights, gassed and shelled, suffering frightful casualties, but never yielding, till the line was safe, and fresh troops had come up.  It was not six weeks since at Neuve Chapelle the Canadians had for the first time, while not called on to take much active part themselves, seen the realities of European battle; and the cheers of the British troops at Ypres as the exhausted Dominion troops came back from the trenches will live in history.