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In the first week of July, 1915, the British took two hundred yards of German trenches, eighty prisoners and three trench mortars. The German commander now turned once more to Hooge.
Beside us, the innumerable, water-logged shell-holes, in which, at one time or another in the swaying forward and backward of the fight, the lives of brave men have been so piteously lost, strangled in mud and ooze; here a mere sign-post which tells you where Hooge stood; there the stumps that mark Sanctuary Wood and Polygon Wood, and another sign-post which bears the ever-famous name of Gheluvelt.
Round Ypres, and up by Boesinghe and Hooge you remember Hooge? the 14th, 20th, and 6th Divisions took turns in wet ditches and in shell-holes, with heavy crumps falling fast and roaring before they burst like devils of hell.
Inside of three minutes, more shells were planted, some of them landing plumb in the square, and, to my intense sorrow, I learned later that Fox, my little chum, there had paid the supreme price. These shells were totally unexpected, coming from the Hooge district, 11 miles distant. Everybody sought shelter in the cellars, or any other hole they could crawl into, until night.
The "Princess Pats," as they were known at home, turned over their quarters to the Ninth Lancers who were followed by the Fifteenth Hussars and the Second Camerons. On May 24, 1915, the Germans made a great gas attack. They had placed along the line from St. Julien to Hooge a great number of gas tanks. They then started a bombardment with asphyxiating shells.
They had been slain in large numbers in that "holding attack" by Hooge on September 25th, during the battle of Loos, as I have told. Now they were "going in" again, and were very sorry for themselves, but hid their feelings from their men.
It was only at seven-thirty in the morning of Tuesday, after thirty hours under shell-fire, that the survivors came away from their rubbish heap in the lines of death. So it was at Hooge on that day of August. I talked with these men, touched hands with them while the mud and blood of the business still fouled them.
How the little Canadian army preserved the tradition and barred "the road-hog of Europe" from the channel coast for seventeen months, let history tell, and at what cost let the dead declare who lie in unmarked graves which, following the curving line of trenches from Langemarck through Hooge and Sanctuary Wood over Observation Ridge to St.
Its body was thrown to fill the trenches it had won, and was the bridge across which our impatient guns drove in pursuit of the enemy. What is that figure now? An unspoken thought, which charges such names as Bullecourt, Cambrai, Bapaume, Croiselles, Hooge, and a hundred more, with the sound and premonition of a vision of midnight and all unutterable things.
Yet, when they had dragged themselves wearily and blindly out of the trenches, the fighting men of the Fighting Fifth were given but a day's rest or two before the 15th and two battalions of the 13th were sent to Hooge, and the remainder to hold sectors of the line farther south.
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