“It’s all right,” said the scout. “They haven’t seen us or got track of us. They’re just firing on suspicion.” Nevertheless, when our various platoons had all got into the front reserve trenches, at about two hours after midnight, we learned that the first blood of our battalion had been spilled. Two men had been wounded, though neither fatally. Our own stretcher-bearers took our wounded back to the field hospital at Dinkiebusch. The men of the Twenty-sixth battalion spent the rest of the night instructing us and then left us to hold the position. We were as nervous as a lot of cats, and it seemed to me that the Germans must certainly know that they could come over and walk right through us, but, outside of a few casualties from sniping, such as the one that befell the Fourteenth platoon man, which I have told about, nothing very alarming happened the first day and night, and by that time we had got steady on our job. We held the position for twenty-six days, which was the longest period that any Canadian or British organization had ever remained in a front-line trench. In none of the stories I’ve read, have I ever seen trench fighting, as it was then carried on in Belgium, adequately described. You see, you can’t get much of an idea about a thing like that, making a quick tour of the trenches under official direction and escort, as the newspaper and magazine writers do. I couldn’t undertake to tell anything worth while about the big issues of the war, but I can describe how soldiers have to learn to fight in the trenches--and I think a good many of our young fellows have that to learn, now. “Over there,” they don’t talk of peace or even of to-morrow. They just sit back and take it. We always held the fire trench as lightly as possible, because it is a demonstrated fact that the front ditch cannot be successfully defended in a determined attack. The thing to do is to be ready to jump onto the enemy as soon as he has got into your front trench and is fighting on ground that you know and he doesn’t and knock so many kinds of tar out of him that he’ll have to pull his freight for a spot that isn’t so warm. That system worked first rate for us. During the day, we had only a very few men in the fire trench. If an attack is coming in daylight, there’s always plenty of time to get ready for it. At night, we kept prepared for trouble all the time. We had a night sentry on each firing step and a man sitting at his feet to watch him and know if he was secretly sniped. Then we had a sentry in each “bay” of the trench to take messages.