82...............CANADA IN FLANDERS.
how they bore themselves, but the thousand vivid
and intimate episodes, seen between two blasts of
gunfire, or recounted by men met by chance in some
temporary shelter, can never all be told. Yet they
are too characteristic in their unconsciousness to be
left without an attempt at a record; so I give a little
handful from a great harvest.
In the days before the battle, when the Canadians
lived for the most part in and about Sailly, whence
one saw, as I have already written, the German
trench-flares like Northern Lights on the horizon,
Honorary Captain C. T. Costigan, of Calgary, was
the paymaster, and lived, as the paymaster must, de-
cently remote from the firing line. Then came the
attack that proved Canada; and the German flares ad-
vanced, and advanced, till they no longer resembled
flickering auroras, but the sizzling electric arc-lights
of a great city. Captain Costigan locked up his pay-
chest and abolished his office with the words: "There
is no paymaster." Next, sinking his rank as
honorary captain, he applied for work in the trenches,
and went off, a second lieutenant of the 10th
Canadians, who needed officers. He was seen no
more until Monday morning, when he returned to
search for his office, which had been moved to a
cellar at the rear and was, at the moment, in charge
of a sergeant. But he had only returned to inveigle
some officer with a gift for accounts into the pay-
mastership. This arranged, he sped back to his
adopted Battalion.1He was not the only one of his
department who served as a combatant on that day.
1 Captain Costigan has now combative rank in the 10th Bat-
talion and is acting as Brigade Bombing Officer.
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