I had the familiar feeling of nervousness and physical shrinking and nausea at the beginning of this fight, but, by the time we were half way across “No Man’s Land,” I had my nerve back. After I had been hit, I remember feeling relieved that I hadn’t been hurt enough to keep me from going on with the men. I’m not trying to make myself out a hero. I’m just trying to tell you how an ordinary man’s mind works under the stress of fighting and the danger of sudden death. There are some queer things in the psychology of battle. For instance, when we had got into the German trench and were holding it against the most vigorous counter attacks, the thought which was persistently uppermost in my mind was that I had lost the address of a girl in London along with some papers which I had thrown away, just before we started over, and which I should certainly never be able to find again. The Regina trench had been taken and lost three times by the British. We took it that day and held it. We went into action with fifteen hundred men of all ranks and came out with six hundred. The position, which was the objective of our battalion, was opposite to and only twelve hundred yards distant from the town of Pys, which, if you take the English meaning of the French sound, was a highly inappropriate name for that particular village. During a good many months, for a good many miles ’round about that place, there wasn’t any such thing as “Peace.” From our position, we could see a church steeple in the town of Baupaume until the Germans found that our gunners were using it as a “zero” mark, and blew it down with explosives. I have said that, because we were on the extreme right of the line, we had the hottest little spot in France to hold for a while. You see, we had to institute a double defensive, as we had the Germans on our front and on our flank, the whole length of the trench to the right of us being still held by the Germans. There we had to form a “block,” massing our bombers behind a barricade which was only fifteen yards from the barricade behind which the Germans were fighting. Our flank and the German flank were in contact as fiery as that of two live wire ends. And, meanwhile, the Fritzes tried to rush us on our front with nine separate counter attacks. Only one of them got up close to us, and we went out and stopped that with the bayonet. Behind our block barricade, there was the nearest approach to an actual fighting Hell that I had seen.