Of the sixty odd men who had started in our party, forty-three were found to be casualties--killed, wounded, or missing. The missing list was the longest. The names of these men were marked, “M. B. K.” (missing, believed killed) on our rolls. I have learned since that some few of them have been reported through Switzerland as prisoners of war in Germany, but most of them are now officially listed as dead. All of the survivors of the raiding party were sent twenty miles to the rear at seven o’clock, and the non-commissioned officers were ordered to make reports in writing concerning the entire operation. We recorded, each in his own way, the ghastly failure of our first aggressive effort against the Germans, before we rolled into the hay in the same old barn where we had been quartered during the days of preparation for the raid. I was so dead tired that I soon fell asleep, but not for long. I never slept more than an hour at a time for several days and nights. I would doze off from sheer exhaustion, and then suddenly find myself sitting straight up, scared half to death, all over again. There may be soldiers who don’t get scared when they know they are in danger or even when people are being killed right around them, but I’m not one of them. And I’ve never met any of them yet. I know a boy who won the Military Medal, in the battle of the Somme, and I saw him on his knees before his platoon commander, shamelessly crying that he was a coward and begging to be left behind, just when the order to advance was given. Soldiers of our army who read this story will probably observe one thing in particular, and that is the importance of bombing operations in the present style of warfare. You might say that a feature of this war has been the renaissance of the grenadier. Only British reverence for tradition kept the name of the Grenadiers alive, through a considerable number of wars. Now, in every offensive, big or small, the man who has been trained to throw a bomb thirty yards is busier and more important than the fellow with the modern rifle which will shoot a mile and a half and make a hole through a house. In a good many surprising ways this war has carried us back to first principles. I remember a Crusader’s mace which I once saw in the British museum that would make a bang-up knob-kerrie, much better than the kind with which they arm our Number 4 men in a raiding party section. It had a round, iron head with spikes all over it. I wonder that they haven’t started a factory to turn them out.