He's hit." Gee, I jumped up in a
hurry and ran down the trench to where Tommy was; but I breathed freely
when I saw that it was only a hole through his arm--I was afraid he had
got it bad. "How did you get it, Tommy?" I said. He said, "Oh, you
know the sandbags we rolled out of the way to fire through last
night?--well, I thought some one might be walking past and get a bullet
through his bean, as a fellow had farther down the trench, so I put up
my arm to roll the bag into place, and _bingo_! Fritzie was right on
the job." I wrote to Tommy's mother that night and told her that I
thought Tommy had a Blighty, and she came all the way out from Canada
to see him. But he didn't get farther than our base hospital, and he
was back to the trenches again in six months, so his mother did not see
him after all.

Well, after Tommy left us, we were sent back to rest billets, and it
was then that the Battle of Hooge started. We could bear the guns
roaring and at night the whole sky on our left was lit up. The roads
were jammed with machine guns, marching troops, cyclists, and
cavalry--while coming from the scene of battle was a constant stream of
ambulances. Tales of what was going on came leaking through and we
fully expected to be sent up. But we couldn't move without orders, and
we thought we might just as well enjoy ourselves, so we got up an
open-air concert. It certainly was a dandy, and we had no end of a
time. A lot of the old boys took part; and then some one got up and
gave us a parody on "The Sunshine of Your Smile." It goes like this:

"Oh, Fritzie that hands those Blighties out so free,
Just send a nice sweet cushy one to me--
One that will strike me just below the knee.
Six months in Blighty--oh, how sweet 'twould be!

"Send me a shell with pellets nice and round;
Scatter them, all but one, upon the ground;
Send me that one, but let it come a mile,
And I will give you the sunshine of my smile."

This met with great applause, and we sang it till we all learned the
words. The concert was scarcely over when our officers told us that
word had come for us to be ready to move at a moment's notice. After
talking to some of our wounded boys that had come back from the
fighting, we began to realize that something very serious was
happening. They told us that whole battalions of Canadians had been
wiped out by shell fire. Fritzie had just blown everything to pieces
before he adva