nt away, returning a minute or two later to have another look. By
this time I was feeling quite stiff, but he was quite satisfied that no
live man could be there. Had I jumped into a shell-hole, as fear
prompted me to do, he would have roused the whole line, and a bomb
would likely have got me. However, I thought this would be a good
opportunity to take a look into the trench, for I reasoned that this
sentry must be alone or some one else would have put up the flare while
he fired the shot. Probably the rest of his regiment were on a working
fatigue not far away. It was a breastwork trench and I climbed up the
sand-bags, but tripped over a wire at the top and came down with a
clatter. A red flare went up and I heard the feet of many soldiers
running along the duck-boards. I only had time to roll into the ditch
at the foot of the back of the parapet, where I was quite safe from
observation, when they manned their trench to repel the "raid." After
several minutes when about a hundred rifles, several machine-guns, and
a trench-mortar were pouring their fire into No Man's Land, I began to
recover my nerve and saw that it would be a good opportunity to mark
the position of one of these machine-guns which was firing just above
my head. In fact, I could, with ease, have had my hand drilled just by
holding it up. I tore a page out of my note-book and placed it in a
crevice between the sand-bags, just under the gun. Hours afterward
when all was quiet I returned to our own trenches and fastened another
piece of white paper to a bush half-way across No Man's Land that I
noticed was in line with a dead tree close to our "sally-port," and my
first piece of paper. In the morning the artillery observation officer
could see these two pieces of paper quite plainly with his glasses, and
that trench was levelled for fifty yards.

No Man's Land is a place of surprises where death plucks its victims
without warning. There have been some strange deaths there when bodies
lay with unbroken skin, having neither mark of bullet nor shell. Times
when the spirit laid the body down, fair and unmarred human flesh, but
other times when the flesh was rent to ribbons and the bones smashed to
splinters by the force imprisoned in a shell.

Such was the death meted out by justice to six Germans in a listening
post fifty yards in advance of their trench. This party was in the way
of our raid. We could not enter their trench by surprise witho