An unfortunate and tragic mishap occurred just outside of Albert when the Somme offensive started on July 1. The signal for the first advance was to be the touching off of a big mine. Some fifteen minutes before the mine exploded the Germans set off one of their own. Two regiments mistook this for the signal and started over. They ran simultaneously into their own barrage and a German fire, and were simply cut to pieces in as little time, almost, as it takes to say it. The Germans are methodical to such an extent that at times this usually excellent quality acts to defeat their own ends. An illustration of this was presented during the bombardment of Albert. Every evening at about six o’clock they would drop thirty high-explosive shells into the town. When we heard the first one coming we would dive for the cellars. Everyone would remain counting the explosions until the number had reached thirty. Then everyone would come up from the cellars and go about his business. There were never thirty-one shells and never twenty-nine shells. The number was always exactly thirty, and then the high-explosive bombardment was over. Knowing this, none of us ever got hurt. Their methodical “evening hate” was wasted, except for the damage it did to buildings in the town. On the night when we went in to occupy the positions we were to hold, our scouts, leading us through the flat desert of destruction, got completely turned ’round, and took us back through a trench composed of shell-holes, connected up, until we ran into a battalion of another brigade. The place was dreadful beyond words. The stench of the dead was sickening. In many places arms and legs of dead men stuck out of the trench walls. We made a fresh start, after our blunder, moving in single file and keeping in touch each with the man ahead of him. We stumbled along in the darkness through this awful labyrinth until we ran into some of our own scouts at 2 A.M., and found that we were half-way across “No Man’s Land,” several hundred yards beyond our front line and likely to be utterly wiped out in twenty seconds should the Germans sight us. At last we reached the proper position, and fifteen minutes after we got there a whiz-bang buried me completely. They had to dig me out. A few minutes later another high-explosive shell fell in a trench section where three of our men were stationed. All we could find after it exploded were one arm and one leg which we buried. The trenches were without trench mats, and the mud was from six inches to three feet deep all through them. There were no dug-outs; only miserable “funk holes,” dug where it was possible to dig them without uncovering dead men. We remained in this position four days, from the 17th to the 21st of October, 1916.