s. But I prefer, and I know he, a soldier, would
prefer, to chronicle the events of his day after day just as they
occurred, without colour, and without comment.

I print, then, Sydney Baxter's account of the fighting as he wrote it.
I promised that this should be an altogether true chronicle, and it is
well that some who live in the shelter of other men's heroism should
know of the sacrifices by which they are saved. And then, too, as I
read his pages, I heard a suggestion that we were all in danger of
"spoiling" the wounded who come back to us after enduring, for our
sakes, the pains he here describes.

"For three nights the bombardment had been tremendous.

"It was 7 o'clock on the Sunday morning when we first got
the alarm--'turn out and be ready to march off at once.' We
heard that the Hill--the famous Hill 60--had gone up and
that we had been successful in holding it, but the rumours
were that the fighting was terrific. We were soon marching
on the road past battered Vlamertinghe. Shells of heavy
calibre were falling on all sides, and we made for the
Convent by the Lille gate, by a circuitous route--round by
the Infantry Barracks. We dumped our packs in this Convent,
where there were still one or two of the nuns who had
decided to face the shelling rather than leave their old
home.

"We were sorted up into parties. Our job was to carry barbed
wire and ammunition up to the Hill. I was first on the
barbed-wire party; there were about fifty of us and we
collected the 'knife-rests' just outside the Lille gate, and
proceeded up the railway cutting. Shells were falling fairly
fast, as indeed they always seemed to along this cut. At
last we got our knife-rests up by the Hill and dumped them
there. Fortunately we had very few casualties. We started to
go back, but, half-way, we were stopped at the Brigade
Headquarters, a badly damaged barn, and were told that we
had to make another journey with bombs. We were just getting
a few of these bombs out of the barn when the Boches landed
three shells right on top of it. Many of our men were laid
out, but we had to leave them and try to get as much
ammunition out as possible. The barn soon caught fire, and
this made the task a very dangerous one indeed. Every minute
we were expecting the whole lot of ammunition to go up, but