Free Canada in the Great Power Game 1914-2014 by Gwynne Dyer

double, and they rallied with shouts of “Brave Anglaise”.… We drove the Germans back, a few hundreds of Canadians against thousands of Germans. But I don’t think they knew there was only such a small number of us. It was getting dark … anyhow, we gained the situation and dug holes into the ground, and neither the Germans nor their terrible shelling could move us, and wasted out and tired as we were, doing without sleep and not much food, we stuck to them five days and nights, until we were relieved.… We have now got pads to put over our nostrils and mouth, ready for the poisonous gas that those German curs use.…
    You would hardly know me now. I have aged quite a bit in looks, also in feelings, and got very thin. It is all with the continued hardships and nerve-racking things we have to endure. Well, dear mother, I will close, hoping I am alive to receive your answer to this letter.
    John Carroll (Paris, Ontario), machine-gunner, 3rd Brigade, CEF
    The 1st Canadian Division did all that was asked of it and finished with a desperate bayonet charge. But the cost was terrible. Hundreds of good, willing lads gave up their lives without a murmur. Personally, I suffered from a bullet wound in the right side of my body and two in my right leg. Those in my leg are healing fine, but the one through my body, of course, is not doing well.… I was lying on my side firing when I got the first bullet through my leg, followed shortly after by another in the right side, and a second in the leg.…
    Ask Lorne to find out for me how Knill, Larin, Cullum and Murray are. Never saw any of them after the fight started, and am anxious about the fellows. I do hope that the Paris boys come through alive, for it was terrible work.
    I heard a good joke while lying on the road at Ypres. One of our stretcher bearers asked a severely wounded Irishman if there were many dead on the field, and he answered, “Sure, it’s alive with dead men.”
    A.D. Fraser (Paris, Ontario), April 1915 (Napoleon Larin and A.E. Cullum were wounded, and Ivor Murray was dead. Fraser survived the war.)
    The Canadians lost 6,341 men at Ypres, and two weeks later, at Festubert, they were asked to do it again. They were short of high-explosive shells and the map of the objective was printed upside down, so Brigadier-General Arthur Currie, the ranking Canadian officer, asked for a postponement of the attack. He was refused. The Canadians managed to advance six hundred yards and captured the eastern hedge of an orchard. Their casualties were 2,468.
    Prime Minister Borden stood up in the House of Commons and said: “They have proved themselves equal to any troops in the world, and, in doing so, they have brought distinction and renown to the Dominion.” It was all true, but the gap in comprehension between those at home and those at the front was growing as wide as the Atlantic. Talbot Papineau (grandson of the leader of the 1837 rebellion), who was serving in Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, did not think in terms of distinction and renown any more:
    I hate this murderous business. I have seen so much death—and brains and blood—marvellous human machines suddenly smashed like Humpty Dumpties. I have had a man in agony bite my finger when I tried to give him morphine. I have bound up a man without a face. I have tied a man’s foot to his knee when he told me to save his leg and knew nothing of the few helpless shreds that remained. He afterwards died.
    I have stood by the body of a man bent backward over ashattered tree while blood dripped from his gaping head. I have seen a man apparently uninjured die from the shock of explosion as his elbow touched mine. Never shall I shoot duck again or draw a speckled trout to gasp in my basket—I would not wish to see the death of a spider.
    Talbot Papineau letters, Public Archives of Canada
    In early December 1915 Jairus Maus died of the “clean” wounds he had received at Ypres about seven months earlier