o visit the
tents, too, and sitting on a box in their midst have a smoke and talk
with the men. Heavy indeed has been the toll of casualties which that
noble brigade has suffered since those happy days.

Word was sent to the Division one day by the British troops holding
our trenches on Hill 70, that some bodies of our men were lying
unburied in No Man's Land. One of our battalions was ordered to
provide a burial party and I decided to accompany them. I was to meet
the men at a certain place near Loos on the Lens-Arras road in the
evening, and go with them. The burial officer turned up on time, but
the party did not. At last the men arrived and we went through the
well-known trenches till we came to the front line. Here I had to go
down and see some officers of the British battalions, and try to find
out where the bodies were. Apparently the officers could give us
little information, so we decided to divide up into small parties and
go into No Man's Land and search for the dead ourselves. As we were in
sight of the enemy, we could not use our electric torches, and (p. 208)
only by the assistance of German flare-lights were we able to pick
our steps over the broken ground. We found a few bodies which had not
been buried, but it was impossible to do more than cover them with
earth, for the position was an exposed one. We did the best we could
under the circumstances, and were glad to find that the number of
unburied had been greatly exaggerated. On another occasion I took a
burial party out one night, and found that the officers and men sent
were a new draft that had never been in the line before. They were
much interested in the novel and somewhat hazardous nature of the
expedition. On this occasion when we returned to Bully-Grenay, the
morning sun was shining brightly overhead, and it began to get quite
warm. The men were very tired with their night's work, and when we
halted they lay down on the pavement by the road and went to sleep.
One poor fellow actually collapsed, and we had to send off to a
dressing station for a stretcher on which he was taken away for
medical treatment. A burial party, from the nature of the case, was
not a pleasant expedition, and Canada ought to be grateful for the way
in which our Corps burial officers and the men under them carried out
their gruesome and often dangerous duty. One of our burial officers, a
fine young fellow, told me how much he disliked the work. He said,
"There is no