At a little before daybreak came “stand-to,” when everybody got buttoned up and ready for business, because, at that hour, most attacks begin and also that was one of the two regular times for a dose of “morning and evening hate,” otherwise a good lively fifteen minutes of shell fire. We had some casualties every morning and evening, and the stretcher-bearers used to get ready for them as a matter of course. For fifteen minutes at dawn and dusk, the Germans used to send over “whiz-bangs,” “coal-boxes” and “minniewurfers” (shells from trench mortars) in such a generous way that it looked as if they liked to shoot ’em off, whether they hit anything or not. You could always hear the “heavy stuff” coming, and we paid little attention to it as it was used in efforts to reach the batteries, back of our lines. The poor old town of Dinkiebusch got the full benefit of it. When a shell would shriek its way over, some one would say: “There goes the express for Dinkiebusch,” and a couple of seconds later, when some prominent landmark of Dinkiebusch would disintegrate to the accompaniment of a loud detonation, some one else would remark: “Train’s arrived!” The scouts who inhabited “No Man’s Land” by night became snipers by day. Different units had different systems of utilizing these specialists. The British and the French usually left their scouts and snipers in one locality so that they might come to know every hummock and hollow and tree-stump of the limited landscape which absorbed their unending attention. The Canadians, up to the time when I left France, invariably took their scouts and snipers along when they moved from one section of the line to another. This system was criticized as having the disadvantage of compelling the men to learn new territory while opposing enemy scouts familiar with every inch of the ground. As to the contention on this point, I could not undertake to decide, but it seemed to me that our system had, at least, the advantage of keeping the men more alert and less likely to grow careless. Some of our snipers acquired reputations for a high degree of skill and there was always a fascination for me in watching them work. We always had two snipers to each trench section. They would stand almost motionless on the fire steps for hours at a time, searching every inch of the German front trench and the surrounding territory with telescopes. They always swathed their heads with sand bags, looking like huge, grotesque turbans, as this made the finest kind of an “assimilation covering.” It would take a most alert German to pick out a man’s head, so covered, among all the tens of thousands of sand bags which lined our parapet. The snipers always used special rifles with telescopic sights, and they made most extraordinary shots. Some of them who had been huntsmen in the Canadian big woods were marvellous marksmen. Frequently one of them would continue for several days giving special attention to a