necessary to saturate their
gas masks, which had just been issued to the soldiers; we succeeded in
borrowing 500 pounds from a wide-awake army corps and took it down in
the car to an advanced dressing station which the brigade would have
to pass. The Germans were particularly jumpy that night as we felt our
way along that very rough road with no light to guide us except the
electric green light of the numerous German flares, the occasional
flashes of a powerful German search light sweeping the sky and ground,
and the angry red spurts from the guns which lit up the sky like
summer lightning.

Once we had occasion to make a trip from one shelled village to
another, the driver had been given the direction and no further
attention was paid to him until we came across a reserve trench manned
by Ghurkas. This drew our attention to the fact that the country was
quite unfamiliar. However, the next French sign post showed us that we
were on a road leading to the desired village and we kept on.

The day was very quiet and hazy and it was impossible to see very far.
We suddenly came upon the remains of a little village which had been
literally levelled to the ground; not two feet of brick wall could be
seen anywhere. At the cross roads in the centre of the village two
military policemen seemed to be surprised at our appearance with a
large motor car but said nothing, evidently thinking that we knew our
own business best, and we made the correct turn according to the sign
board and kept on. About two hundred yards farther on we ran into a
veritable maze of trenches, barbed wire entanglements and dug-outs,
without doubt part of the front line trench system. Needless to say we
made a rapid right-about face and speedily retraced our steps by the
road we had come.

We found later on that the road we had taken did go to the village
that we wanted to visit but that it went through the German trenches
en route. At the point where we had turned, which was only four
hundred yards from the German trenches, thirty men had been killed by
snipers during that month while getting water at one of the wells in
the neighborhood. The haze in the atmosphere saved us from observation
for we would have been a fine target for rifles, machine guns and even
whiz bangs.

We met officers in every branch of the service,--infantry, cavalry,
artillery, flying corps, ordnance, army service, medical, engineers,
construction, water transport, etc., and there