d dinner with Colonel (now General) Rennie and our old
friends of the third (Toronto) battalion who were located in a little
peasant cottage in Neuf Berquin. In a room adjoining Captain Haywood,
the medical officer of the battalion, lay on a pile of straw with
symptoms of appendicitis. He was not too sick to give some extremely
graphic descriptions of his first experiences in the trenches, while
we all sat around and smoked. The room was lighted by a single stable
lantern which also smoked and we sat on boxes; I have seldom passed a
more pleasant evening in my life than that spent in the little peasant
cottage with my soldier friends, Captains George Ryerson, Muntz,
Wickens, Major Allan (all since dead), Major Kirkpatrick (now a
prisoner in Germany), Captains Hutchison, Bart Rogers, George,
Lyne-Evans, Robertson, (of the first battalion) and others. Some of
these chaps I knew well in Canada and we talked of home and the old
times, all the while realizing that some of us would never again get
back. The feeling was now fast settling down upon us that we were
actually at war, and that soon some of the men we had grown to admire
and love would have to pay the price.

During the evening two stocky little French girls came in and sang
"Eet's a longa, longa wye to Teeperaree" in English for the "seek
Capitan."

The Canadian division was in rest during those early April days when
the cold, long-drawn out spring became almost imperceptibly warmer and
the buds were beginning to swell on the trees and bushes.

On the first day of April, Bismarck's birth-date, we were expecting
something unusual along the front and were not disappointed. While
driving up to the Clearing Station to breakfast, we noticed a couple
of Hun aeroplanes being shelled by our "Archibalds." When we returned
to the town half an hour later we found that the place had been
bombed.

One bomb had gone right through Rankin's billet, exploded in the
workshop on the ground floor and blown out all the windows; another
had fallen in the square about twenty yards in front of my billet and
had failed to explode, while six others had fallen in different parts
of the town, half of which were "duds." Nobody was hurt and no other
damage was done.

Bittleson, Captain Rankin's batman, who happened to be looking out of
the top window at the time, swore that the bomb which went through the
roof beside him had grazed his forehead.

The bomb which had failed to explode in