[Fields of Victory by Mrs. Humphry Ward]@TWC D-Link book
Fields of Victory

CHAPTER II
7/22

I turn a little to the south and I am looking towards Klein Zillebeke where the Household Cavalry charged, and Major Hugh Dawnay at their head "saved the British position," and lost his own gallant life.

Straight ahead of us, down the Menin road towards Gheluvelt, came the Prussian Guards, the Emperor's own troops with their master's eye on them, on November 11th, when the First Division in General Haig's First Corps, checked them, enfiladed them, mowed them down, till the flower of the Imperial troops fell back in defeat, never knowing by how small a fraction they had missed victory, how thin a line had held them, how little stood between them and the ports that fed the British Army.

Here on these flats to my right were Lord Cavan's Guards, and on either side of him General Allenby's cavalry, and General Byng's; while, if one turns to the north towards the distance which hides Sonnebeke and Bixschoote, one is looking over the ground so magnificently held on our extreme left by General Dubois and his 9th French Corps.
Guards, Yorkshires, Lancashires, London Scottish, Worcesters, Royal Scots Fusiliers, Highlanders, Gordons, Leicesters--all the familiar names of the old Army are likend with this great story.

It was an English and Scotch victory, the victory of these Islands, won before the "rally of the Empire" had time to develop, before a single Canadian or Australian soldier had landed in France.
But that is only the first, though in some ways the greatest, chapter in this bloodstained book.

Memory runs on nearly six months, and we come to that awful April afternoon, when the French line broke under the first German gas attack, and the Canadians on their right held on through two days and nights, gassed and shelled, suffering frightful casualties, but never yielding, till the line was safe, and fresh troops had come up.


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