t hesitate one minute but went across to J 4. He seemed to have
had a charmed life. Shells were bursting all around him but he never
got a scratch. That night Corporal Ingraham and the McNeil brothers,
the three biggest dare devils that were in our battalion left our
dugout on a wire cutting expedition. Imagine, three or four men lying
on their backs in mud and water cutting at Fritz's wire just a few
feet away from his trench! Jones would go around his gun teams to make
sure that everything was all right and then he would visit his wire
cutting party.

Night after night Toby would be engaged in this dangerous and telling
work. It proved too much for flesh and blood, and one night just as a
visit was planned he broke right down and was carried to our lines on
a stretcher. Well, Toby got the blame for the failure of that evening
and left our battalion; but as the old adage puts it "You can't keep a
good man down" and Toby Jones enlisted again as a private in the 42nd
Battalion--won back his commission with the D.C.M. and a bar. Every
man in the "Fighting Twenty-Fifth" lifts his hat to Toby Jones--the
greatest hero of them all!

We carried out several raids the next few weeks on the Kimmel front,
and, as a matter of fact, it is no exaggeration to say that
trench-raiding which has since been carried out so extensively was
really initiated by the "Fighting Twenty-Fifth." Before proceeding
further, let me describe a trench. They are all transversed, because
if a shell or bomb should burst in one part of the trench the
transverse prevents the spread of the shrapnel. A communication trench
is usually to connect the trenches together, and sometimes these
trenches are a mile long reaching from the front line to some part
behind the line where it is comparatively safe to walk around. They
are very deep and zig-zag in shape so that they cannot be enfiladed.

On the Belgian front we could not have deep dugouts for the soil was
so soft. To dig down a few feet was to strike water. At first we only
had sand bags shelters, then we had the corrugated iron ones which
were shrapnel and bomb proof.

Chapter Four

We stayed on the Kimmel front from September 15th until sometime in
February. We were never in anything big here for it was winter time
and we had all our work cut out in repairing and rebuilding trenches.
Now I have made mention of the fact that we came out for a rest, but
that does not mean to say that we didn'