The narrative begins: “The true story of the trenches has never been told. I know, because for many months I lived in trenches. I have slept daily in dread of bullet, shrapnel, mine and deadly gas; and nightly in fear of mine and gas—and the man-eating rats. I am one of the few soldiers living who entered the front trenches at the opening of the war and lived to fight the Germans in the front trenches in February, 1916. Of my original company (the Fourth of the Fourteenth Battalion, Third Brigade, First Canadian Division) which so gayly marched away to that hell at Laventie and Ypres—500 brave boys—I am one of the sixteen who survived. And returning unexpectedly, snatched by the American Government (as an American citizen who had enlisted under age) out of the very jaws of death, with the mud of the trenches still upon my clothing, I discovered how much American people have been talking of the trenches and how little, after all, they know about them.” AGONIES OF BODY AND MIND And during that trench existence, there was, he thinks, no conceivable agony of body or mind which he did not see and experience. There was the gas—“a crawling yellow cloud that pours in upon you, that gets you by the throat, and shakes you as a huge mastiff might shake a kitten, and leaves you burning in every nerve and vein of your body with pain unthinkable, your eyes starting from their sockets, your face turned yellow green.” There were the rats—“I see them still, slinking from new meals on corpses, from Belgium to the Swiss Alps. Rats, rats, rats, tens of thousands of them, crunching between battle lines while the rapid fire guns mow the trench edge, crunching their hellish feasts. Full fed, slipping and sliding down into the wet trenches they swarm at night—and more than one poor wretch has had his face eaten off by them attacking him in his sleep.” [Illustration: _Drawn by Joseph Cummings Chase._ Corporal Whitney D. Sherman _2nd Division, 5th Regiment, 18th Company, U. S. M. C._ This soldier is a fine type of Marine and showed himself to be a brave and valiant soldier at the Battle of Belleau Woods, now known as the Bois de la Brigade de Marine. He was wounded in action June 10, 1918, in this engagement.] There was the stink from decaying bodies, the filth of days and weeks of unmarked accumulation. “Ah! you would say ‘Roméo, Houle, you are lying’ were I to tell you some unbelievable things that I have really lived through. We go mad over there. My God! I am sick of adventure, for the adventures I have had will plague my sleep until I die.”