We follow the same plan.  For, as we advance in short sharp rushes, the observation officer, who never for a moment relaxes his hold on the situation, flashes back by telegraph or field telephone the command to the artillery lying miles away to raise their curtain of fire.  They do so, and shells fall on the German reserves, while we press forward, teeth bared and cold steel gleaming grayly, to take the front lines.  We leap the parapet of the German trench.  We spot our man and bear down on him.  We clean out the dugouts and haul away the cowering officers, and already we are straightening and strengthening the German trench.

Behind us come wave on wave of our reserves.  The second will take the second trench of the enemy; the third, the third, and so on.  Then we consolidate our position, and Fritz is a sad and sorry boy.

That is the way it should work, but in the early days of the war we used to find this very difficult.  We of the front line would charge and take our trench.  We would get there and not a German to be seen!  He would be beating it down his communication trenches, or what was left of them, as hard as he could go.  We were supposed to stay in the front trench of the enemy.  Well, it was simply against human nature, against the human nature of the First Canadian boys at any rate.  We may have been out there for months and not had a chance to see a German.  And had been wishing and waiting for this very opportunity.  We would see Fritz disappear round a traverse and we simply could not stand still and let him go, or let the other fellow get him.  We were bound to go after him.  This was really our traditional weakness.  Often-times we went too far in our eagerness to capture the Hun, and were unable to hold all that we got.

In the early days, too, we charged in open formation.  Certainly we lost, in the first instance, fewer men by that method, but when we reached the enemy trench, took it, and had established ourselves therein, we were rarely strong enough in numbers to repulse the almost certain counter-attacks that came a few minutes or even an hour or so later.

We have altered this method now.  We attack, not in the close formation, shoulder to shoulder, of the German, but in a formation which is a variation of his.  We attack in groups of twenty or thirty men, who are placed shoulder to shoulder.  If a shell comes over one group, it is obliterated, to be sure, but suppose no shell comes; then several such groups will reach the enemy lines, and Hans has not got the ghost of a chance once we get to close quarters.  He has not the glimmer of a chance in a counter-attack when we have sufficient men to hold on to what we have gained.

On the other hand a German charge on our lines is a pretty sight.  They advance at a dog-trot.  They come shoulder to shoulder, each man almost touching his neighbor.  They are in perfect alignment to start, and they lift their feet practically in exact time one with the other.  Unlike us, they shoot as they advance.  We have a cartridge in our magazine, but we have the safety catch on.  We dare not shoot as we advance because our officers are always ahead, always cheering the boys forward.  The German officer is always behind.  He drives his men.