but he had no part in their consumption.  The volunteers were known as the “Jam-tin Artillery Party,” from the fact that their bombs were made of jam-tins filled with gun-cotton, cordite, etc.  The party had to do all the “sticky work,” and this was a very sticky job.  The plan was to lay a trail with a fuse to bombs, which we placed under the floor at the top of the stairs leading to the upper storey of this old and disused gateway.  We crept up these stairs silently for three nights running before we were successful.  One hitch and the whole show would have been given away.  However, we managed to place the bombs, light the fuse, blow up the floor, and blow off the top of the tower as well, the German signaller being blown up with it.  Then we waited.  Still the enemy showed no sign of moving, and word was sent back to our artillery to shell the building, which it did to great effect.  We were then ordered to advance with fixed bayonets, in platoons, to take various buildings.  The place when we captured it was found to be fitted up like a fortress inside, with machine guns trained on the yard to mow our men down as they came through the gate, if the enemy’s plan had succeeded; but it entirely failed.  We found but little resistance.  Inside were a number of dead Germans killed by our artillery fire, a very scientific signalling apparatus, and a complete telephone system to the army corps which was intended to have wiped us out.  It was solely due to our scouts and the “Jam-tin Artillery Party” that we were not all killed.

[Illustration:  The black tower.]

The sketch entitled “The Black Tower” exhibits the other side of the gateway, and shows the road with the caretaker’s house, and our barricades to the right.

DILAPIDATED QUARTERS.

[Illustration:  Where the trap was set.]

The part of the distillery buildings standing in its yard interior, where we blew up the tower and the spy, and into which the enemy had hoped to entice us to our destruction, was very old, very dirty, and very dilapidated—­in fact, had apparently not been used for years.  We had to sleep in it for several nights, and made the acquaintance of thousands of rats and other pests.  There was only one staircase, by which some hundreds of troops had to find access and egress.  A curious fact was that the fumes of the spirit had eaten so into the woodwork, which was generally worm-eaten and rotten, that to strike a light near it was to incur the danger of igniting it and burning the building down.  But our boys found a walled-in yard in the background covered by a tarred roof which had no windows, and this they converted into a smoke-room.  Roominess and a covering offered a welcome change from the mud, dirt, and rain of the trenches, and Tommy’s spirits kept up, in spite of all shortcomings.  Our musical evenings continued as before, and we thoroughly enjoyed being able to stretch our legs.  In fact, we had become quite reconciled as well as quite used to our surroundings by the time we were called away.  Afterwards we looked back with pleasure to our stay in the distillery, for we were much worse off in the next place at which we were stationed.  We were moved from here into one of the most dangerous positions in the line at Ypres.