Bagpipes skirled as Canadian soldiers paraded "somewhere in Belgium" last week. While silk-hatted Belgian functionaries looked on, Britain's Field Marshal Sir Bernard Law Montgomery pinned decorations on 60 Canadian officers and men. Over a loudspeaker, "Monty" said that the victory in the Battle of the Scheldt Estuary, fought largely by Canadian infantrymen, was "magnificent." He doubted that any other troops could have accomplished it.
Like muddy, bloody Passchendaele 27 years before, the Scheldt battle was fought under soul-sickening conditions.*
The First Canadian Army fought for four weeks across the oozy Dutch polders, plodded relentlessly through knee-deep mud. Floods, pouring through demolished dikes, were so deep that often troops had to push through captured towns in amphibious vehicles. A British correspondent described the battleground as "the abomination of desolation." For days on end, he said, the troops had to stand waist deep in water. Canadian Pressman Alan Randal claimed that "conditions were the worst that the Western Front had seen in this war." He found two Canadian units that had been "fighting twelve nights and twelve days without rest."
The cost, Prime Minister Winston Churchill said in London, was "very great." But he added: "Now we stand on the threshold of Germany."
*Of Passchendaele, Canadian Historian George M. Wrong wrote: ". . . perhaps the most hideous fight in the whole war. Hundreds of horses and men were drowned in the liquid mud. . . ."