n a small pyx, the Blessed Sacrament, and the
next morning I gave Communion to a number of the men. One young
officer, a boy of eighteen, who had just left school to come to the
front, asked me to have the service in his dugout. The men came in
three or four at a time and knelt on the muddy floor. Every now and
then we could hear the crack of a bullet overhead striking the
sandbags. The officer was afterwards killed, and the great promise of
his life was not fulfilled in this world.

There was a great deal of rifle fire in the trenches in those days.
The captain told me the Canadians were adepts in getting rid of (p. 041)
their ammunition and kept firing all night long. Further down the
line were the "Queen's Own Westminsters." They were a splendid body of
young men and received us very kindly. On my way over to them the next
morning, I found in a lonely part of a trench a man who had taken off
his shirt and was examining the seams of it with interest. I knew he
was hunting for one of those insects which afterwards played no small
part in the general discomfort of the Great War, and I thought it
would be a good opportunity to learn privately what they looked like.
So I took a magnifying glass out of my pocket and said, "Well, my boy,
let me have a look for I too am interested in botany." He pointed to a
seam in his shirt and said, "There, Sir, there is one." I was just
going to examine it under the glass when, crack! a bullet hit the
sandbags near-by, and he told me the trench was enfiladed. I said, "My
dear boy, I think I will postpone this scientific research until we
get to safer quarters, for if I am knocked out, the first question my
congregation will ask will be, "What was our beloved pastor doing when
he was hit?" If they hear that I was hunting in a man's shirt for one
of these insects, they will not think it a worthy ending to my life."
He grinned, put on his shirt, and moved down the trench.

That afternoon a good many shells passed over our heads and of course
the novelty of the thing made it most interesting. After a war
experience of nearly four years, one is almost ashamed to look back
upon those early days which were like war in a nursery. The hideous
thing was then only in its infancy. Poison gas, liquid fire, trench
mortars, hand grenades, machine guns, (except a very few) and tanks
were then unknown. The human mind had not then made, as it afterward
did, the sole object of its energy the destructio