re seemed a long time. As I told you, we were
working just south of Peronne on the main road between St. Quentin and
Amiens. She started on a foggy morning and for two days the music kept
getting closer. On the first day, all traffic was frontward, men, guns,
and camions going up towards the lines, and then the tide began to flow
back.

"Ambulances and camions, full of poor wounded devils, filled the road,
and then came labour battalions of chattering Chinks, Egyptians, and
Fiji Islanders and God knows what. None of these birds were lingering,
because the enemy was sprinkling the roads with shells and sorter
keeping their marching spirits up. Orders came for us to ditch our packs
and equipment all except spades, rifles, belts and canteens, and we set
off toward the rear.

"Do you mind your map of the Somme? Well, we pulls up at Chaulnes for a
breath. It was a big depot and dump town--aeroplanes and everything
piled up in it. We were ordered onto demolition work, being as we was
still classed as non-combatants. I don't know how many billions of
dollars' worth of stuff we blew up and destroyed, but it seemed to me
there was no end of it. Fritz kept coming all the time and they hiked us
on to Aubercourt and then to Dormant, and each place we stopped and dug
trenches, and then they shoots us into camions and rushes us north to a
town not far out of Amiens.

"With about forty men, we marched down the road, this time as
non-combatants no longer. We stopped just east of the village of
Marcelcave and dug a line of trenches across the road. We had twenty
machine guns and almost as many different kinds of ammunition as there
was different nationalities in our trench. Our position was the fifth
line of defence, we was told, but the guns kept getting closer and a
lot of that long range stuff was giving us hell. Near me there was a
squad of my men, one Chink, three Canadians, and we two Dublin
fusileers.

"Then we begin to see our own guns, that is, British guns, beginning to
blow hell out of this here village of Marcelcave right in front of us.
It made me wild to see the artillery making a mistake like that, so I
says to one of these here Dublin fusileers:

"'Whatinell's 'matter wid dose guns firing on our own men up there in
the village? If this is the fifth line, then that must be our fourth
line in the village?'

"'Lad,' says the Dublin fusileer to me, 'I don't want to discourage you
for the life of me, but this only use