“The Canadians, dashing on behind, overbalanced the struggling pair,
so that the Westphalian officer fell backward into the mud, with
the Colonel on top. In the dark the Canadian soldiers did not know
whether their leader had been killed or not. They did not take time to
investigate. They rushed over the two struggling men, trampling them
deeper and deeper into the mire of the trench. The Colonel found the
throat of the German officer. The struggle was soon over, so that he
could catch up to his men.”
During the attack on Ypres Guthrie resigned his position and asked to
be sent to the Tenth. Of that engagement, Mr. Howard says:
“The Tenth had been badly battered in taking back from the woods
four British guns that had been captured. The gallant Colonel Boyle,
with seven machine-gun bullets in his body, had for two hours in the
darkness of the night lain in a shell-hole surrounded by his men and in
true Western style, with a revolver in each hand, had repelled repeated
attacks. Then he was carried away to die, and Major MacLarinthe,
second in command, leading the charge, was shot through the knee.
After crawling forward with his men to a little clump of woods which
he helped to capture he was shot through the head and killed. Major
Ormand, too, fell wounded. Four officers of the thirty-one were left
when it fell to the lot of Junior Lieutenant Guthrie, as he had become
in order to go to the Tenth, to lead the battalion.
“During the succeeding days the fighting surged back and forth over
Ypres’s hillsides, during which time the battalion suffered greatly
from the gas-clouds that were let loose now and then.
“One time, when leading his men, the Colonel fell with a bayonet wound
in the chin. On another occasion his nose was broken, but this did
not put him out of action. He suffered from the concussion of a shell
on another occasion and was knocked out for five hours. On another
day he was put out of business by a gas-shell which exploded near him
and he was dragged out of a ditch full of water by a British general,
who forced him to emit the gas by thrusting his fingers down his
throat. A scar on the knee shows where the Colonel was punctured with
a bayonet-point. His hand has been ripped open by a bayonet which he
held while grappling with an assailant. The outcome of it was that the
Canadians held the line at Ypres until reinforcements came.”