nuous fire, but
the Germans, taken by surprise, were several minutes getting started.
When they did open up, however, they gave us the greatest
demonstration of accurate and unlimited artillery fire which I, or any
of us, for that matter, had ever seen. The air seemed to be literally
full of shells bursting like a million fire-flies. Our parapets were
blown down in a hundred places and the air was filled with flying
sand-bags, iron beams and timbers. A shell struck under the gun by
which I was standing and flung gun, tripod, ammunition-box and all,
high into the air. Even under such conditions I could not help
laughing at the ridiculous sight of that gun as it spun around in the
air, with the legs of the tripod sticking stiffly out and the belt of
ammunition coiling and uncoiling around it, like a serpent. The
lance-corporal in charge of it looked on, spell-bound, and when it
finally came down back of a dug-out, he looked at me with a most
peculiar expression and said: "Well, what do you think of that?" Then
he jumped up and went after the wreckage and, strange to relate, not a
thing was broken. After about twenty minutes of stripping and cleaning
he had the gun back on the parapet, shooting away as though nothing
had happened. He was an Irishman, named Meeks.

I walked down the trench to get a spare barrel for a gun when a shell
struck about ten feet in front, killing a man. I started on and
another lit exactly where I had been standing. During that little trip
of perhaps fifty yards and back I was knocked down and partly buried
no less than four times.

Then the prisoners commenced to come back. They appeared to be glad to
get out of it and I don't blame them. When they found that they had to
go through the Canadian's lines, however, they held back. They had
been told that the Canadians killed all prisoners. (We had heard
something of the same kind about the Germans, too.) However, when our
cooks came out with "dixies" full of steaming tea, with bread and
marmalade sandwiches, they soon became reconciled. Our men made no
distinction that morning between captor and captive, serving all alike
with everything we had to eat or drink. At one time, however, owing to
the congestion in the trench, we were compelled to "shoo" a lot of the
prisoners back "overland," to the next support trench. As their
artillery was raising merry hell all over that section, they were a
bit backward about starting and it required threats and a