"Ambulances and camions, full of poor wounded devils, filled the road, and then came labour battalions of chattering Chinks, Egyptians, and Fiji Islanders and God knows what. None of these birds were lingering, because the enemy was sprinkling the roads with shells and sorter keeping their marching spirits up. Orders came for us to ditch our packs and equipment all except spades, rifles, belts and canteens, and we set off toward the rear. "Do you mind your map of the Somme? Well, we pulls up at Chaulnes for a breath. It was a big depot and dump town--aeroplanes and everything piled up in it. We were ordered onto demolition work, being as we was still classed as non-combatants. I don't know how many billions of dollars' worth of stuff we blew up and destroyed, but it seemed to me there was no end of it. Fritz kept coming all the time and they hiked us on to Aubercourt and then to Dormant, and each place we stopped and dug trenches, and then they shoots us into camions and rushes us north to a town not far out of Amiens. "With about forty men, we marched down the road, this time as non-combatants no longer. We stopped just east of the village of Marcelcave and dug a line of trenches across the road. We had twenty machine guns and almost as many different kinds of ammunition as there was different nationalities in our trench. Our position was the fifth line of defence, we was told, but the guns kept getting closer and a lot of that long range stuff was giving us hell. Near me there was a squad of my men, one Chink, three Canadians, and we two Dublin fusileers. "Then we begin to see our own guns, that is, British guns, beginning to blow hell out of this here village of Marcelcave right in front of us. It made me wild to see the artillery making a mistake like that, so I says to one of these here Dublin fusileers: "'Whatinell's 'matter wid dose guns firing on our own men up there in the village? If this is the fifth line, then that must be our fourth line in the village?' "'Lad,' says the Dublin fusileer to me, 'I don't want to discourage you for the life of me, but this only used to be the fifth line. We are in the first line now and it's up to you and me and the Chink and the rest of us to keep the Fritzes out of Amiens. At this moment we are all that's between.' "We started to the machine guns and began pouring it in on 'em. The minute some of 'em would start out of the town we would wither them. Holy mother, but what a beautiful murder it was! "I didn't know then, and don't know yet, what has become of all the rest of our officers and men, but I sorter felt like every shot I sent over was paying 'em back for some of their dirty work. We kept handing it to 'em hot. You oughter seen that Chink talking Mongolian to a machine gun, and, believe me, he sure made it understand him. I'm here to say that when a Chink fights, he's a fighting son-of-a-gun and don't let anybody kid you different.