n
shrapnel bullets and a lot of high explosive splinters, American
experts to the contrary. The thick overcoat and the pack is the next
best thing to a coat of mail.

Sergeant Lewis and I jumped out and pulled him out on to the banquette
of his trench and in a minute had the overcoat and jacket off him. His
shirt followed and there, sunk into the flesh of his back about half
an inch from his spine and almost half an inch deep, was the black
shrapnel bullet. I picked it out with my pen-knife and handed it to
him with a silent prayer of thanksgiving.

"There's the bullet. You're worth a dozen dead men yet," I said.

The look of relief on his face was worth seeing.

"Will you let me have the bullet as a souvenir?" I asked.

"Yes, Colonel."

He was not the only man relieved.

We dressed the wound with iodine and put a pad and a piece of plaster
over it. He put on his clothes and I told him to go back to the
dressing station, but he refused and kept on fighting.

We held the narrow trenches all afternoon and evening. Fierce fighting
was going on all around us and we spent a very disagreeable night dug
in in Mother earth.

My men endeavored in every way possible to make me comfortable. Sergt.
Coe requisitioned a long bolster pillow from a ruined estament in
Wiltje for me to sleep on. Another man brought in a few fresh eggs
that some Flemish hens had laid in a henhouse in the outskirts of the
village. The occupants of Wiltje had all disappeared. Some of them
were dead in their cellars, which were not proof against the high
explosive shells.

Towards dawn in spite of the lurid glare of bursting shells and the
roaring of the flames in the burning houses, the Flemish roosters
crowed lustily, typifying the Belgian as well as the French nation.

Dawn came at last but it brought no cessation of the terrible
artillery fire. The fighting along the line to the north still
continued. The British troops were holding their own and dealing lusty
blows at the enemy.

This was the situation as outlined by Corporal Pyke, one of my
signalling staff who had gone away to the right to see what was going
on in the old "hot corner." A British Division had taken up the
supporting trenches of the 2nd Canadian Brigade along the crest of the
Gravenstafel Ridge. They had our supporting trenches east of Hennebeke
Creek along the Kerrselaer Zonnebeke highway to the ruined houses at
Enfiladed crossroads where I had met Captain Victor Currie