11/04/2026
In April of 1915, Canada’s first full division of soldiers had been in the trenches for only a few weeks.
They were young volunteers from every part of the country. Farmers, clerks, miners, students, lumbermen. Most had never seen a real battle.
They were stationed near the Belgian town of Ypres, holding part of the front line beside French colonial troops.
On the afternoon of April 22, 1915, the German army did something that had never been done before on a battlefield of that scale.
Around five o’clock, German soldiers opened thousands of metal cylinders along their front line.
A low, yellowish-green cloud began drifting across no man’s land, carried by the wind.
It was chlorine gas.
The cloud rolled into the trenches held by the French troops next to the Canadians. The soldiers there had no masks and no warning. The gas burned their eyes, throats and lungs. Men choked, collapsed and died. Others fled in terror.
Within minutes, a gap several kilometres wide opened in the Allied line.
The Canadians were right on the edge of it.
If the Germans poured through that gap, the whole Allied position around Ypres could collapse.
The Canadians didn’t run.
They turned to face the gap and fought to close it.
That night, two Canadian battalions launched a desperate counterattack into a wood held by the Germans, charging across open ground in the dark. Many were cut down. But they slowed the German advance.
Two days later, on April 24, the Germans released gas again.
This time, it rolled straight toward the Canadian trenches.
The soldiers had no gas masks. They had to improvise.
Someone knew, or guessed, that soaking a cloth and breathing through it might help. There wasn’t enough water in the trenches. So many men did the only thing they could. They urinated on handkerchiefs, socks and pieces of cloth, and held them over their faces.
It sounds unbelievable. But it helped. Chemicals in the urine reacted with the chlorine and reduced its effects.
Coughing, choking, eyes streaming, the Canadians stayed in their trenches and kept firing.
They fought for days with gas, artillery and machine guns against them. They held on until British reinforcements arrived to stabilize the line.
The cost was terrible.
In just a few days at what became known as the Second Battle of Ypres, the Canadian division suffered about 6,000 casualties. Around 2,000 men were killed.
It was Canada’s first major battle of the First World War.
And it changed how the rest of the world saw Canadian soldiers. British and French commanders who had wondered how these untested colonials would perform now knew. They had faced the first great gas attack in history and refused to break.
Among the Canadians at Ypres that spring was a doctor from Guelph, Ontario, named John McCrae.
He spent days tending the wounded in a dressing station near the canal. In early May, one of his close friends was killed. The next day, looking at the poppies growing among the graves, he wrote a short poem.
He called it In Flanders Fields.
It became one of the most famous war poems ever written, and the reason so many of us wear a poppy every November.
When you wear a poppy this year, think about Ypres.
Young Canadians with no masks and no experience, watching a strange green cloud come toward them across the fields, pressing wet cloths to their faces, and refusing to leave the line.
Lest we forget. 🍁
