went in and helped themselves to straw and came out loaded down with armfuls of it.  I decided to follow suit and went over, just reaching the barn, when Kr-kr-kr-p!—­the first shell that came going right amongst them, setting the barn on fire and wounding several of the 48th.  Their presence had been made known by a secret service agent, as it is one chance in a hundred thousand for a shell to hit so desirable a target at the first shot.  The aim was excellent and the work accomplished by the shell was splendid—­from a German point of view.

CHAPTER VI

BITS OF BATTLE

On the way over to the barn, where the shell hit the 48th, a piece of a tree limb smashed into the ground at my feet, following the familiar whiz just overhead of a large gun missive, with its accompanying wind gust, and at the same moment something struck with a thud the tree from which the splinter had come.  Glancing up, I noticed a shell lodged in a fork of the two main branches, that had stuck there without exploding.  For a shell to explode, it is necessary that the nose of the fuse, containing the detonator, shall come in contact with a solid substance, in order to make ignition and cause the explosion.  This had not been done; owing to the intervention of kind nature in the shape of the crotch in that tree catching and holding the shell fast in a firm embrace, we were saved from that additional disaster and death.

A dried-up creek that was being used by us for a trench on the Ypres sector was crossed by a wooden bridge about thirty feet long.  This bridge was used as a means of transport at night and by Red Cross men in the daytime, and was very useful; it was most important that it be kept in constant repair.  I was detailed in charge of the repair party.  One day during the great Ypres battle, about ten o’clock in the morning, the bridge was smashed and I took my party up and made the necessary repairs.  We had hardly returned to cover when the bridge was smashed again, and again we rushed out and fixed it up.  As we ran, three men forged ahead of me and got to the middle of the thirty-foot structure; I was about twenty feet behind them, the rest of the party immediately behind me.  I was shouting an order to them, when a shell exploded in the middle of the bridge, killing all three.  I was saved by twenty feet.

In the late afternoon one day of the battle, I was resting in a hole I had burrowed under a sand-bank; about 200 men were burrowed in the same bank in the same way.  A monster shell struck the bank immediately above me, upheaving the ground and completely burying me and half a dozen others.  I was dug out in a half smothered condition, but soon was able to assist in the work of resurrecting the rest.  The only casualty that occurred in that incident was innocently caused by myself; as I was digging, my shovel struck the leg of an officer, inflicting such a gash that when resuscitated he had to go to hospital.