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Five hundred yards to the front, a black silhouette stood
Outlined by the flickering gunfire; St. Julien Wood.
The land between had been blasted and shattered and raped
And, concealed between black, smoking craters, the gates of Hell gaped.
Canadian soldiers stood, waiting for word to advance,
Their minds drinking in this grim vision of beautiful France
While their ears cringed in mental discomfort and physical pain
At the noise of the barrage that screamed around Ypres again.
The time came, and they moved out, advancing in alternate waves
Each two companies strong; each one moving as water behaves,
Flowing forward in silence to find its own level, around
All the upflung confusion of shell-tortured, treacherous ground.
In spite of the darkness of midnight, the going was good
So that, still undetected, their front rank came close to the Wood
Until, just as the forest developed a visible edge,
They ran into the French farmer's border - a strong, healthy hedge!
What to do? There was no way around it, and time was their foe
Just as much as the Germans: smash through; there's nowhere else to go.
So they tried, and they died, row on row, as though caught in barbed wire
As the enemy, startled alert, laid down murderous fire.
Decimated - each tenth man laid dead - was a word coined in Rome,
And the Tenth would have happily settled for that, and gone home,
But the hedge all around them confined them, and try as they would,
They had no way but forward to go ... To St. Julien Wood.
They were out of the hedge now and into the enemy trench
Swinging bayonet and rifle butt, covered in mud, blood and stench,
And they out of the trench and on, up to the edge of the trees
Where the enemy, hidden by tree trunks, could snipe them with ease.
But the surging Canucks were demented by now -- men possessed
By one single and burning incentive -- to clean out this nest
Of demonic and venomous hornets; this devil-spawned brood
Who were trying to stop them from taking St. Julien Wood.
And the Hun staggered backwards, his dead lying heaped on the ground;
Hundred tried to surrender, appalled by the fury they'd found
In these madmen who fought like blind Furies unleased by the gods
Coming forward, and winning, in face of incredible odds!
But then, somehow, the stunned German infantry rallied again
And perceived that the demons who tore at them really were men,
And from enfilade points they set up a new withering fire
That would force these Canadian berserkers to stop and retire.
Those first three hellish hours dragged on to become sixty four;
Almost three solid days of exhaustion, gas, gunfire and gore,
And only one hundred of eight hundred and sixteen men
Came back out of St. Julien Wood into sunlight again.
What they did in that wood, amid carnage and slaughter and strife,
Moved their General to say that the thing he most prized in his life
Was the "Canada" armlet displayed with such pride on his sleeve,
And the honour he felt just to know what his men had achieved.
Refrain
For, as machine guns spewed at them
And shellfire chewed at them
The tired survivors had no water and no food
Because for sixty hours
They'd defied the powers
Of the Kaiser's crack battalions at St. Julien Wood.
The place had been the test of them; It saw the best of them
Blown into glory in the battle's bitter feud,
And the oak leaf medallion
Of the Tenth Battalion
Is the symbol of its glory at St. Julien Wood.
Loud sing the bugles that sound in November,
Calling the Living to pause and remember
Arthur; Lowry; Ormond; Boyle; Comrades resting after battle's toil.
So when the mess kit's sparkling
And the pibroch's darkling
Melody brings gooseflesh and a tingling in the blood
You know the rank and file and Brethren of the Highlanders
Are reliving the Glory of St. Julien Wood.
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