into a smile, and telling us to stick.

"Buller away, too. He was the second in command. Gault succeeded
him. Buller was hit on May 5th and missed the big show--piece of
shell in the eye."

"And Charlie Stewart, who was shot through the stomach. How we
miss him! If ever there were a 'live-wire' it's Charlie. Up or down, he's
smiling and ready for the next adventure. Once he made thirty
thousand dollars in the Yukon and spent it on the way to Vancouver.
The first job he could get was washing dishes; but he wasn't washing
them long. Again, he started out in the North-West on an expedition
with four hundred traps, to cut into the fur business of the Hudson
Bay Company. His Indians got sick. He wouldn't desert them, and
before he was through he had a time which beat anything yet opened
up for us by the Germans in Flanders. But you have heard such
stories from the North-West before. Being shot through the stomach
the way he was, all the doctors agreed that Charlie would die. It was
like Charlie to disagree with them. He always had his own point of
view. So he is getting well. Charlie came out to the war with the
packing-case which had been used by his grandfather, who was an
officer in the Crimean War. He said that it would bring him luck."

The 4th of May was bad enough, a ghastly forerunner for the 8th. On
the 4th the P.P.s, after having been under shell-fire throughout the
second battle of Ypres, the "gas battle," were ordered forward to a
new line to the south-east of Ypres. To the north of Ypres the British
line had been driven back by the concentration of shell-fire and the
rolling, deadly march of the clouds of asphyxiating gas.

The Germans were still determined to take the town, which they had
showered with four million dollars' worth of shells. It would be big
news: the fall of Ypres as a prelude to the fall of Przemysl and of
Lemberg in their summer campaign of 1915. A wicked salient was
produced in the British line to the south-east by the cave-in to the
north. It seems to be the lot of the P.P.s to get into salients. On the
4th they lost twenty-eight men killed and ninety-eight wounded from a
gruelling all-day shell-fire and stone-walling. That night they got relief
and were out for two days, when they were back in the front trenches
again. The 5th and the 6th were fairly quiet; that is, what the P.P.s or
Mr. Thomas Atkins would call quiet. Average mortals wouldn't. They
would try to appear unconcerned and s