During those long and terrible months, in the face of a continued bombardment and of successive counter-attacks, with the line growing thinner, week by week, hacked up by woefully inadequate artillery, the Canadian army had held on with the grim tenacity of death itself.

There was nothing that they could do but hold on.

To push the salient deeper into the enemy lines would only emphasise the difficulty and danger of their position.

The role assigned them was that of simply holding steady with what ultimate objective in view no one seemed to know.
Week by week, and month after month, the Canadian battalions had moved up into the salient, had done their "tours," building up their obliterated parapets, digging out their choked-up water-courses, revetting their crumbling trenches, and rebuilding their flimsy dugouts, and then returning to their reserve lines, always leaving behind them in hastily dug graves over the parados of their trenches, or in the little improvised cemeteries by Hooge, or Maple Copse or Hill 60, a few more of their comrades, and ever sending down the line their maimed and broken to be refitted for war or discharged again to civilian life.

It was altogether a ghastly business, a kind of warfare calling for an endurance of the finest temper and a courage of the highest quality.
From this grim and endless test of endurance, the Canadians had discovered a form of relief known as a "trench raid," a special development of trench warfare which later came to be adopted by their comrades of the French and British armies.