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.
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