In spite of the gain in the enemy’s gunfire, we started our wounded pals to the officers’ dugouts; most of the lads had been so severely shell-shocked that we had a most trying time to keep them in their stretchers.  Men who have been shell-shocked most usually exhibit it by wanting to run off in all directions; I have seen them with wounds that ordinarily would cause them to collapse, but under the influence of the shock exert themselves with such strength and violence that it would take a couple of sturdy men to hold them.  There is a trite saying that every disadvantage has a corresponding advantage and I wondered that night when I got back to the gun pit if nature intended that the advantage from this disaster was the increase in our supper ration due to the death and wounding of my soldier pals!

A few days after, we were notified we were going to drive forward another stage, and I went to the trench with the telephonist party for the purpose of making our communication as clear as possible; I was detailed especially to assist the Captain in this work.

The attack was launched at daybreak, with a ten-minute bombardment preceding, and then our fellows were up and over.  As before, the tanks blazed the way, one of them passing about 30 feet to my right just before I went over the top.  As I lay in the trench, the darling old titan passed me, leveling the wire in front, and I had then an even keener realization of what it meant for Fritz to have these monsters piling over and smashing him under foot just about as a man would tread on a worm and mash it.  And if there ever was one time during my entire three years of campaigning, when I felt an atom of sympathy for the gray-clad devils, it was at that moment.

But how can sympathy obtain for devils in human form?

My immediate family was strongly represented in this attack.  To my right among the men who went over, were the Canadian Grenadier Guards, of which my young brother Billy was a member.  This regiment had made an undying place in the annals of Canadian history in the advance on Courcelette, having out of its 950 men but 66 men left intact when the roll was called after the battle, the balance being either killed or wounded.  But they achieved their objective, Courcelette!

Billy and his regiment, which had been mustered up to strength, passed over the top within four hundred yards of me to the right.  On my left, my older brother, Gordon, who was supporting a trench mortar battery in the front-line trench, was working away within 500 yards of me.  I was not aware of the presence of either until a comparison of notes later on apprised me of their presence.  To my right hand was Hughey and his brother Archie and to my left Jim, three brothers, all of them my first cousins.