behind me. I was shouting an order to them, when a shell exploded in the
middle of the bridge, killing all three. I was saved by twenty feet.

In the late afternoon one day of the battle, I was resting in a hole I
had burrowed under a sand-bank; about 200 men were burrowed in the same
bank in the same way. A monster shell struck the bank immediately above
me, upheaving the ground and completely burying me and half a dozen
others. I was dug out in a half smothered condition, but soon was able
to assist in the work of resurrecting the rest. The only casualty that
occurred in that incident was innocently caused by myself; as I was
digging, my shovel struck the leg of an officer, inflicting such a gash
that when resuscitated he had to go to hospital.

A cunning device of the Germans to misuse the Red Cross came to light
during the next few days. It was in the vicinity of the woods where the
Imperial Batteries had lost their guns. In a counter attack to retake
these guns our men went over, accompanied by the engineers, to destroy
the guns, as it was thought it would be impossible to bring them back.
This turned out to be true, as the enemy advanced in such strong mass
formation that our fellows had their hands full fighting them off until
the engineers made good their work, which they did by smashing the
hydraulic buffers with picks, destroying the sights, blowing the guns
up, and taking the breech-blocks back with them.

In going over the ground that our barrage had covered a few minutes
before, we found lying there German soldiers who had acted as stretcher
bearers, wearing the red cross of Geneva on their arms, for the purpose
of running wires from trench to trench, from battery to battery, and to
headquarters, and the way they did the trick was to take a roll of wire
on a stretcher covered with a blanket, to represent a wounded comrade,