ut he could not have
seen us or else he did not want to give his position away. Anyway we
got the chap in. He belonged to the 14th Battalion and had been out
there for three days. His wounds had stiffened up so that he could not
move. Poor chap, he said that he would have gone crazy that day if we
had not brought him in.

Some very hard fighting took place here for there was an awful lot of
dead Huns lying around. All that morning we made our positions as
secure as possible. At about two that afternoon word came from Col.
Bauld that we were to attack and that the Co. Commanders were all
wanted at Battalion Headquarters. When Capt. MacNeil came back he gave
us the outline of the scheme and told me that I was to stay in the
Subsidiary trench until they had things consolidated, or if they had
to fall back under a heavy counter attack I was to cover the
retirement and hold the trench at all costs. All right! Our barrage
opens up; our fellows go over; up goes Fritz's S.O.S. signals, his
artillery starts. It is maddening where we are. His artillery is
playing all round us, knocking in our trenches in places but never
getting any of my guns or men. Then there is a tremendous fire of
machine guns from Fritz's trench no man could live through. The
bullets are just singing through the air. But our men are quick to
grasp the game and get into some shell holes and wait until it gets a
little dark and then crawl back to our own line. We have quite a few
wounded and some killed. Nothing though when you look at the
resistance. One chap by the name of Porter came crawling into the
trench with an ugly head wound and blood pouring all over his face. He
started swearing at Fritz and ended up by asking for a chew of tobacco
before he went out to the dressing station. We got settled away once
more all prepared for the wily Hun if he should come over.

There were several of attacks on our left that night. It sort of got
our wind up a little. Outside of that everything went well and we
passed a very comfortable night, smoking and tell stories, for there
was no such thing as sleep in the outposts. The next morning at
daylight we took a good observation and everything seemed normal, so
after giving out the rations of food, water and rum, we took turns
and had a sleep until about 11 o'clock when for some reason Capt.
MacNeil was ordered to take his company back to the sunken road in
rear of the trenches so they could have a sleep I had to