a ditch, turned sidewise and spun round
like a top. We stood there, speechless, fascinated by the peculiar
antics of the thing, until it stopped. It was a pretty toy, a 105 mm.,
painted red and with a beautiful brass fuse-cap. I picked it up but as
it was too hot to handle I put on my asbestos gloves, used for
changing barrels of machine guns, and carried it "home" where I put
it away, intending to get some artilleryman to remove the fuse and
explosive so that I might keep it as a souvenir; but a bunch of boys
from the Eighteenth Battalion found it, and taking it back to their
dug-out at Ridgewood, tried to unload it themselves. Some were killed
and several wounded when the thing exploded. I afterward saw one of
those who had been wounded and he told me about it.

At this stage of the soldier's career he is always a "souvenir
hunter," picking up and carrying around with him all sorts of things,
from German bullets to big shells. I was a fiend of the first
magnitude and collected enough stuff to stock a museum, only to have
to abandon it whenever we moved. I had French rifles, bayonets and
other equipment; German ditto and about every size and type of shell
and fuse that was used on our front. Whenever we moved I would bury or
cache the whole lot, in the hope that I could get back for it some
day. But the fever finally wore off, and I got so that I would not
even pick up a German helmet. Now, of course, I wish I had some of
that stuff to show the folks.

On the fifteenth of October we went into the front line; a line which
we, alternating with the Twentieth Battalion, were destined to hold
until the following April. About this time the rains set in "for
keeps" and we were seldom dry or warm or clean for nearly six months.
Mud, mud, nothing but mud--mud without any bottom. We had no trenches,
proper; they were simply sand-bag barricades between us and the enemy
and it was a continual struggle to keep them built up. They would ooze
away like melting butter.

When the deadlock came, in the fall of 1914, and the opposing armies
lay entrenched, from the North Sea to Switzerland, it found the
Germans occupying the dominating heights, with our forces hanging on,
as best they could, to positions on the lower ground.

This was the case at the point where we were located. Our sector
(about eleven hundred yards for the battalion frontage) extended from
the Voormezeele-Wytschaete road, northward to the bottom of the hill
at the