April 18th, Canon Scott preached a sermon to the men.
During the day several shells burst in the town and some of them not
far from our billets. The inhabitants had begun to flee.

About eleven o'clock at night Canon Scott wandered into my billets. He
had been holding service with the men and had lost his way. I was
afraid he would get killed or drowned. He was so zealous, and such a
charming character, he made an ideal chaplain. No hour was too late,
no road too long for him. His son was wounded with another corps and
would lose his eye.

Early in the morning Sergeant Miller of the headquarters staff called
me to witness a duel between a German and a British aviator. It was a
beautiful bright morning, with not a breath of air stirring and not a
cloud in the sky. Away to the north the two aviators were at it,
circling about each other like great hawks. The British aviator was
the smarter of the two, and he finally got the Hun, whose machine
started for the earth nose down at a terrific speed. Both of the
German air men were killed we learned later. It was certainly a
thrilling sight.

The next day, the 19th, more shells were thrown into the town. One
shell fell into the billet where Lieutenant Frank Gibson was
quartered. It killed an old man, his wife and daughter, a beautiful
girl of seventeen. The back of her head was blown off. Lieutenant
Gibson got a splinter of shell in the calf of the leg and had to be
sent to the hospital to have it cut out. The Germans continued
shelling the town all day. When they get beaten they always start
shelling the nearby towns and work their spite off on the inhabitants.
The blowing up of Hill 60 seemed to have stirred them to an
extraordinary degree. Towards dusk I went down the Menin road to watch
the bombardment. Some of our batteries, hidden in the hedges away on
my right, were sending shrapnel across the German lines beyond Hill
60. I could watch the flight of the projectile and its bursting in a
sheet of flame over the enemy's line. The opposing guns were hard at
it, while away in the distance the rapid rattle of rifle fire told of
the tragedies that were being enacted near the crater that Captain
Perry had blown in Hill 60. Away to the south a momentary flash like
sheet lightning on an autumn evening would light the horizon with a
baleful gleam, and after a long interval the muffled roar of a
"Grandma" would mingle with the twang of the bursting shrapnel. Truly
as one British