ern
front. On the top, about two hundred yards away, lay the ruined village
of Thelus; once in it we should be comparatively safe.

I was in the last section of my platoon, and at the top I paused to look
about me at the scene that presented itself. It was horrible; it was
glorious; it was magnificent--it was War. The centre of the road was
fairly clear, but at the edges all was chaos. The night was a wonderful
one; the moon was shining in all her glory, and pale stars twinkled in
the sky. In the bright moonlight I could see all about me dead and
wounded men, wounded men who would surely "go West," for, once down, the
chance of escape from that hell-hole was slight. Here and there were
great W.D. waggons, G.S. waggons, ammunition mules bearing 6-inch
howitzer and the smaller 18-pounder equipment--in fact, everything that
was in any way connected with the grim business that was being carried
on. Here and there, too, through this chaos of war, ration parties
wended their way to and from the front line trenches.

Just as we reached the crest of the ridge, that spur of France that had
taken such heavy toll from Hun and Ally, we heard a warning shout: "Keep
to the edge of the road!" We wondered at the caution. The middle of the
road was comparatively clean, while towards the edges it was ankle-deep
in sticky mud, and we had been floundering around in a quagmire for the
last eleven days. But we soon knew the reason; for while we hesitated
up came a battery of guns at full gallop--big howitzers at that. Drivers
shouted; horses plunged and tugged at their traces; the guns bounded and
rattled in and out of the shell-holes that pitted the road, sometimes
seeming to be balanced on only one wheel. It was a thrilling sight, such
as comes to the eyes of a man only once in a lifetime. It gripped us
all. Poor Sergeant Harry Best, our platoon sergeant, who was near me,
relieved the tension by exclaiming: "Get that, Jim! You will never see
such a sight again, even if you stayed out here for fifty years. If a
painter were to put that sight on canvas he would be laughed at as a
dreamer."

I said, poor Sergeant Best! He had seen the sight of his lifetime, but
he was not long to enjoy it, for the next trip in, when he was all ready
to go to London to take his commission, he was "sent West" by a bomb
from a trench mortar. Harry was a little strict, but he was dead fair,
and, best of all, a thorough soldier. How is it that nearly all the goo