Battery, the Divisional Signallers, the 4th Canadian Field Ambulance, and all the motor ambulance wagons of the Division, left Southampton for Havre. On the night of September 14th the Headquarters Staff and the bulk of the Division embarked, including the 4th Brigade, Canadian Field Artillery. The rest of the Divisional Artillery, the 5th, 6th[4] and 7th Brigades, were left behind for a time to complete their training, proceeding later to France on January 18th, 1916.

Eight battalions were left in reserve and absorbed in the Training Division at Shorncliffe—the 23rd, 30th, 32nd, 36th, 39th, and 43rd, to supply drafts for the Infantry, the 48th for the Pioneers, and the Royal Canadian Regiment afterwards incorporated in the 3rd Division. The 2nd Canadian Division Headquarters in Shorncliffe were then closed.

The voyage of the 2nd Division was not to be a long one like that of the 1st, from Bristol in the West of England to St. Nazaire on the coast of Brittany. The high, white cliffs of Folkestone by day and the light of its lamps by night are clearly visible from the high downs above Boulogne in fair weather; while the light of Gris Nez flashing like a wheeling spearshaft has long been familiar to the Canadian troops. It was for Boulogne that the 2nd Division set out—to the harbours below the heights from which the statue of Napoleon on its great bronze column still looks out, as he did all the summer of 1805, at the white cliffs on which he was never to set foot, to the coast, too, whence Cæsar first saw the almost fabulous land of Britain. Those conquerors of the modern and ancient worlds would have marvelled had they beheld the sailing of 20,000 men of French and British birth from the other side of the Atlantic across the narrow salt-water trench, once the confluent of the Thames and Rhine, to defend the land of Gaul against that Teuton menace which both of these had overthrown.

Who of the millions that have undergone the experience will ever forget their first crossing of the Channel in a troopship? The absence of any lights and the swift drive of the engines give the sense of a stealthy escape from the unseen perils of the deep. Dimly visible for a moment is a dark shape of another transport or some destroyer of the escort. The men who can crowd below are perhaps asleep, but to the remainder, shivering a little on deck in the sea breeze, the whole air and the chopping seas seem to breathe something of danger, of the mystery of the dark, and the romance of the High Adventure yet ahead. It was in this atmosphere that a serious collision occurred. The Staff of the 4th Brigade under Brigadier-General Lord Brooke and the 10th Battalion were aboard a paddle-wheeled steamer when a dark mass suddenly shot out of the night and rammed her amidships. The shock threw everybody off their feet; no one could tell at first whether it was a German cruiser or a friend; and had panic broken out among the massed humanity of over a thousand souls on board it would not have been surprising. But the Volunteer troops showed themselves in calmness and discipline the equal of any Regulars. The instant the collision occurred the troops were paraded on deck with the life-belts which had been provided for them. For a time it was thought that the ship was going down. But the men ranged on deck remained steady in the ranks, and the parties told off to loose the rafts carried out their duties swiftly and surely. The incident adjusted itself. The stranger, which turned out to be one of our own destroyers, had by a fortunate chance struck the great wooden paddle-box of the steamer, and though the latter was for a time out of control, no irretrievable damage had been done. The transport carrying the Divisional Staff stood by and endeavoured to tow her in, but the hawsers and steel cables parted under the strain of the rough weather. It was necessary to send for tugs from Boulogne, and, finally, at five in the morning, that port was made. All through the night an escort of destroyers which had raced up at the first news of the accident circled round flashing their searchlights over the seas to guard against a possible submarine attack, but no enemy appeared to disturb the work of rescue. The remaining ships of the Division, despite the heavy weather, made the passage in security, and the whole body began to pass up country to effect its junction with its comrades of the 1st Division.

The landing in France possessed one feature both of racial and historic importance. The 1st Division had included one company of the 14th Battalion, which was entirely composed of French Canadians, and many others of the same race were scattered among the various units. The 22nd Battalion of the 2nd Division was entirely recruited, as has been recorded, from the French of the old province, and its appearance on the sacred soil of France serves to awaken a host of memories.

There is no parallel in history that matches the picture of the descendants of the men who founded Port Royal and Quebec under Champlain in the first decade of the seventeenth century returning, after three hundred years of absence and a hundred and fifty years under a different flag, to fight once more for the soil whence their ancestors sprang. The German menace has welded the two great nations of the West on the two sea-boards of the Atlantic and linked the centuries together beyond imagination and almost beyond belief. In the firing line at Ypres were found side by side not only the successors of the British who had stayed in their island home and of the French who had remained in France and dealt with the British since on many a hard-fought field in Europe, but the sons of those who had struggled together before the entrenchments of Ticonderoga or on the fateful Plains of Abraham. When after the Seven Years' War in 1763 the Empire of the West passed finally to Great Britain under the pressure of British sea-power and the military inspiration of Chatham, France must have mourned what seemed the irrevocable loss of her sons. Yet in France and Flanders to-day they are risen again for her service, returned across the Atlantic by that same sea-power that once claimed them, and are now warring on the very fields their fathers held, with the same courage and fortitude their race displayed in the eighteenth century against Great Britain.

The French are of all people the most susceptible to an appeal to the imagination. One can imagine their feelings when they learnt that a whole regiment of French Canadians had landed with the 2nd Division. Very strange must have been the meeting between these two branches of a race separated so long by the Seas of Time!

Gradually it dawned on these people that among the strange soldiers from across the ocean were men speaking their mother tongue—not the French, perhaps, of modern Brittany and Normandy, but French none the less. One must picture the joyous effort to find the common idiom and accent, the older country casting back in memory across the years to the point where the two streams of speech had divided, the younger nation of the older speech casting forward to catch the new French which had sprung up since the division. The scene is one for the painter or the novelist, and this wonderful journey's end in lovers meeting must leave an ineffaceable imprint on the memories of both England and France. Dramatic moments are few in modern war, but this was one of them—a fitting pendant to that other scene when the joint memorial to Wolfe and Montcalm was unveiled on the heights of Quebec.