A face turned upward is one of the most easily detected objects by an airplane, and although we had strict orders on no account to look up, the temptation for some was too strong.  Meantime, the minister continued to read the service, but the responses were not as hearty as they had been, and he himself was standing with shoulders hunched up to the back of his neck, the book pulled up to his nose, and furtively trying to see through his eyebrows the danger-birds in the blue.  In the midst of the solemn moment an officer, glimpsing some of the men turning their faces skyward, bellowed, “Damn you, keep those mugs down.”

It was our good fortune that none of the messages reached their intended destination.

CHAPTER VII

SANCTUARY WOODS

(3rd Battle of Ypres)

The third battle of Ypres commenced June 2, lasting until June 15, 1916.  Sanctuary Woods was a cluster of trees, comprising about one thousand in number, and they were the very finest and noblest specimens of their various types,—­oak, elm, ash and beech.  They were located just one mile outside the city in a northwesterly direction.  One of our trenches ran northeast and southwest through the middle of the woods.

The line had been exceptionally quiet for the space of a week.  My battery of six guns was located at a chateau known as the Belgian Garden, about 600 yards in the rear of the wood.  Two guns were ordered into the wood as a sacrifice battery, and my usual luck attached me to one of them.  We were located in a dry ditch, 300 yards back from the front line.  Our orders, as usual in the case of the sacrifice battery, were to wait until the Germans, when they broke through, if they did, were almost in line with our guns.

The morning of the 2nd was a beautiful summer’s day; nature was in perfect repose; the birds sang gayly, the humming of bees and fragrance of flowers filled the air.  We were busily engaged making our morning ablutions in some shell holes when, like a bolt from the blue, hell broke loose in the form of the most violent bombardment I had experienced up to that time, lasting twenty minutes, missiles of every kind raining down on us on all sides.  “Stand to!”—­and we waited.

At the end of twenty minutes our men started jumping out of their trenches ahead of us and charging across.  They were met by the enemy in mass formation and overwhelmed.  They died to a man.  The Germans pressed the attack home and came on, yelling like fiends incarnate, drunk with the joy of their apparent success and promised victory.  On they came, apparently irresistible.  We commenced firing, and I had the satisfaction of seeing gaps blown in their ranks and many of them biting the dust.  Our poor little battery, however, feazed them but little.

And I want to say right at this time that the idea that seems to be prevalent in the minds of many that the German is not a good fighting man is a lamentable mistake; he is a good fighter.  He has not perhaps the initiative of the British, or the avalanche-like ardor in a charge of the French soldier, but with his officers pressing him behind and in mass formation, he is as formidable a foe as can be imagined.