complaints from
soldiers and generally criticising the conduct of army affairs.

Well, we got through the bath and the next day were on our way.
This time it was up the line to another sector. My one taste of
trench action had made me keen for more excitement, and in spite of
the comfortable time at Petite-Saens, I was glad to go. I was yet
to know the real horrors and hardships of modern warfare. There
were many days in those to come when I looked back upon
Petite-Saens as a sort of heaven.

CHAPTER VI

HIKING TO VIMY RIDGE

We left Petite-Saens about nine o'clock Friday night and commenced
our march for what we were told would be a short hike. It was
pretty warm and muggy. There was a thin, low-lying mist over
everything, but clear enough above, and there was a kind of poor
moonlight. There was a good deal of delay in getting away, and we
had begun to sweat before we started, as we were equipped as usual
with about eighty pounds' weight on the back and shoulders. That
eighty pounds is theoretical weight.

As a matter of practice the pack nearly always runs ten and even
twenty pounds over the official equipment, as Tommy is a great
little accumulator of junk. I had acquired the souvenir craze early
in the game, and was toting excess baggage in the form of a Boche
helmet, a mess of shell noses, and a smashed German automatic. All
this ran to weight.

I carried a lot of this kind of stuff all the time I was in the
service, and was constantly thinning out my collection or adding to
it.

When you consider that a soldier has to carry everything he owns on
his person, you'd say that he would want to fly light; but he
doesn't. And that reminds me, before I forget it, I want to say
something about sending boxes over there.

It is the policy of the British, and, I suppose, will be of the
Americans, to move the troops about a good deal. This is done so
that no one unit will become too much at home in any one line of
trenches and so get careless. This moving about involves a good
deal of hiking.

Now if some chap happens to get a twenty-pound box of good things
just before he is shifted, he's going to be in an embarrassing
position. He'll have to give it away or leave it. So--send the
boxes two or three pounds at a time, and often.

But to get back to Petite-Saens. We commenced our hike as it is was
getting dark. As we swung out along the once good but now badly
furrowed French road, we could see the Very