they go into the trenches, shove their hats on their rifles, wave them about, and then shout across to the Germans to come out in the open and have a proper fight.  Whenever this happens the Germans lie low and hardly fire a shot.

“One advantage of being so close to the Germans is that they cannot shell us without damaging their own trench as much as ours, so that, although we heard plenty going along overhead, we had none very near us.”

One Young Man at Hill 60

CHAPTER V

ONE YOUNG MAN AT HILL 60

Many have described in vivid, and none in too vivid, language the fighting in the spring of 1915.  This one young man went through it all, through the thickest of it all.  He can tell a tale which, if written up and around, would be as thrilling as any yet recorded of those heroic days.  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