ening General Byng decided to throw in the third
division, who had been held in reserve. I watched them as they came
over, and it was a great sight. The 42nd Highlanders were in the lead,
and they came in long lines with their bayonets fixed. The Germans
spotted them as soon as they came over the ridge and immediately turned
their guns on them, but they came on steadily in spite of their losses,
over the top of us, and into the Hun lines. They cleaned up what was
left of the Germans and established themselves firmly in Courcelette.
The French Canadians had been holding Courcelette all day, but had lost
heavily.

Well, that night we went back in reserve; we were all in, and we
staggered along till we got to the brick fields at Albert. There we
had our bivouacs and we turned in. Next morning I went over to see
Bink, and we felt pretty blue. Tommy, Flare-pistol Bill, Barbed-wire
Pete, and Lieutenant Oldershaw were all killed, and half a dozen
others, including Rust, were wounded. Poor old 10th Platoon, they were
going fast! Bink, Fat, McMurchie, Erne Rowe and I were the only ones
left of my old pals, and the ones who were gone were the ones I had
chummed with most. Bink and I had a lot of sad letters to write to the
boys' relatives that day.

Shortly after this we were taken back of the line a few miles and
reorganized, and in a few days we were back in the trenches again. The
battalion went in at Courcelette a night or two before me, and such a
place it was. The German artillery had made it a veritable hell-hole.
What was once a pretty town was now a pile of bricks with a sunken road
running through it, and leading down to a cemetery. When I went in
with a Stokes gun, the 28th held the graveyard; such a time as we had
getting in. We were shelled all the way, and the nearer we came to
Courcelette the hotter it got. Finally we reached that sunken road and
it was strewn with dead bodies, our lads and Germans. We started to
set up our gun in the bank beside the road, and how we did dig. The
shells were tearing up everything around us, and Tommy Lowe and I dug
like demons. Our crew had three casualties almost immediately, two
wounded and one killed. We got our gun set up, but as we were short of
ammunition we had to wait for a counter-attack before we were allowed
to fire. The 31st made an attack that morning, but got hung up on the
German wire entanglements and lost heavily. When daylight came things
we