Early in the night the Fighting Tenth and the Sixteenth charged the wood of St. Julien.  Through the undergrowth they hacked and hewed and fought and bled and died.  But, outnumbered as they were, they got the position and captured the battery of 4.7 guns that had been lost earlier in the day.

This night the Germans caught and crucified three of our Canadian sergeants.  I did not see them crucify the men, although I saw one of the dead bodies after.  I saw the marks of bayonets through the palms of the hands and the feet, where by bayonet points this man had been spitted to a barn door.  I was told that one of the sergeants was still alive when taken down, and before he died he gasped out to his saviors that when the Germans were raising him to be crucified, they muttered savagely in perfect English, “If we did not frighten you before, this time we will.”

I know a sergeant of Edmonton, Alberta, who has in his possession to-day the actual photographs of the crucified men taken before the dead bodies were removed from the barnside.

Again I maintain that war frightfulness of this kind does not frighten real men.  The news of the crucified men soon reached all of the ranks.  It increased our hatred.  It doubled our bitterness.  It made us all the more eager to advance—­to fight—­to “get.”  We had to avenge our comrades.  Vengeance is not yet complete.

In the winter of 1914-1915 the Germans knew war.  They had studied the game and not a move was unfamiliar to them.  We were worse than novices.  Even our generals could not in their knowledge compare with the expertness of those who carried out the enemy action according to a schedule probably laid down years before.

We knew that on the day following the terrible night of April twenty-second we must continue the advance, that we dare not rest, that we must complete the junction with the right wing of the British troops.  And the enemy knew it, too.

We expected that the Germans would be entrenched possibly one hundred or even two hundred yards from our own position, but not so.  His nearest entrenchment was easily a mile to a mile and a half across the open land from us.

The reason for this distance was simple enough.  We had succeeded in our bluff that we had many hundreds more of men than in reality was the case.  The enemy calculated that had we this considerable number of troops we would capture his trenches, were he to take a position close in, with one short and mad rush.  He further calculated that had we even a million men, he would have the best of us if we attempted to cross the long, open flat land in the face of his thousands of machine guns.

April twenty-third was one of the blackest days in the annals of Canadian history in this war, and again it was one of the most glorious.  That day we were given the task of retaking the greater part of the trenches which the Turco troops had lost the day preceding.