Others, again, there were in whose heart burned a deep passion to get into grips with those hellish fiends whose cruelties, practised upon defenceless women and children in that very district where they were camped, and upon wounded Canadians, had stirred Canada from Vancouver to Halifax with a desire for revenge.
But, with the great majority there was little of the desire either for military glory or for revenge.

Their country had laid upon them a duty for the discharge of which they had been preparing themselves for many months, and that duty they were ready to perform.

More than that, they were eager to get at it and get done with it, no matter at what cost.
With all this, too, there was an underlying curiosity as to what the thing would be like "up there." Far down below all their feelings there lay an unanswered interrogation which no man dared to put to his comrade, and which indeed few men put to themselves.

That interrogation was: "How shall I stand up under the test ?" The camp was overrun with rumours from returning battalions of the appalling horrors of the front line.

Ever since that fateful 22nd of April, 1915, that day of tragedy and of glory for the Canadian army, and for the Canadian people, the Ypres salient, the point of honour on the western front from Dixmude to Verdun, had been given into the keeping of the Canadian army.