ad been killed that morning. The battalion
had to charge down the hill in the face of heavy machine-gun fire.
Some tanks were standing by the farm and one of the officers offered
to take me with him in the machine, but as it was to go into the 2nd
Divisional area I had to decline the invitation and follow up our men
on foot. I passed a number of German wounded. One of them, a young
lad, was terribly alarmed when he saw me approaching, thinking I was
going to murder him. He held up his hands and shouted, "Kamarad!" I
think the Germans had heard wild stories of the ferocity of (p. 284)
Canadians. The boy then began to implore me to send him to an ambulance.
He was wounded in the leg, and had bound up his wounds very neatly and
skilfully. I tried to make him understand that the stretcher-bearers
would come up in time, and I stuck his rifle in the ground with his
helmet on the top of it, as a signal to the bearer party.

Before me at the end of the road, I saw amid trees the village of
Warvillers. Many men were going towards it from all directions; and I
saw our artillery brigades taking up battery positions to the left. I
met two men of the 5th Battalion and we started off to the village
together. The place was now in our hands, as the Germans had evacuated
it some hours before. The houses were quite intact and offered
prospects of pleasant billets. My companions and I, finding it was
quite late in the afternoon, determined to go and have our meal in a
garden near the Chateau. We sat down on the grass and opened our
bully-beef tins, and seeing onions growing in the garden thought it
would be a good thing to have that savoury vegetable as a relish. It
added to the enjoyment of our simple meal to think that we were eating
something which the Germans had intended for themselves. We managed to
get some fresh water too from a well nearby, which looked quite clean.
On the other side of a wall we could see the roof of the Chateau. One
of the men thought he would like to go and explore and find out who
was there. He came back a few minutes afterwards and said it was full
of Germans. So, taking their rifles, the two men went off to attack
it, thinking they had found a stronghold of the enemy. I was just
having a smoke after my meal when the lads came back and said that the
Germans whom they had seen were our prisoners and that the Chateau had
been taken over by us as a dressing station. We made our way to it and
found that i