It happens that the driving charge does not explode, and the projectile remains in the tube. The fuse of the mine continues burning, and the mine explodes in the tube and demolishes the stand and everything in its neighborhood. When we used those mine throwers here for the first time an accident of the kind described happened. Two volunteers and a sapper who were in charge of the mine thrower in question thought the explosion took too long a time. They believed it was a miss. When they had approached to the distance of some five paces the mine exploded and all three of them were wounded very severely. We had too little experience in the management of mine throwers. They had been forgotten, had long ago been thrown on the junk heap, giving way to more modern technical appliances of war. Thus, when they suddenly cropped up again during the war of position, we had to learn their management from the beginning. The officers, who understood those implements still less than we ourselves did, could not give us any hints, so it was no wonder that accidents like the foregoing happened frequently. Those mine throwers cannot be employed for long distances; at 600 yards they reach the utmost limit of their effectiveness. Besides handling the mine throwers we had to furnish secret patrols every night. The chief purpose of those excursions was the destruction of the enemy's defenses or to harry the enemy's sentries so as to deprive them of sleep. We carried hand grenades for attack and defense. When starting on such an excursion we were always instructed to find out especially the number of the army section that an opponent we might kill belonged to. The French generally have their regimental number on the collars of their coat or on their cap. So whenever we "spiflicated" one and succeeded in getting near him we would cut that number out of his coat with a knife or take away his coat or cap. In that way the German army command identified the opposing army corps. They thus got to know exactly the force our opponent was employing and whether his best troops were in front of us. All of us greatly feared those night patrols, for the hundreds of men killed months ago were still lying between the lines. Those corpses were decomposed to a pulp. So when a man went on nocturnal patrol duty and when he had to crawl in the utter darkness on hands and knees over all those bodies he would now and then land in the decomposed faces of the dead. If then a man happened to have a tiny wound in his hands his life was greatly endangered by the septic virus. As a matter of fact three sappers and two infantrymen of the landwehr regiment No. 17 died in consequence of poisoning by septic virus. Later on that kind of patroling was given up or only resorted to in urgent cases, and only such men were employed who were free of wounds. That led to nearly all of us inflicting skin wounds to ourselves to escape patrol duty.