His first acquaintance with the trench under fire was at Richebourg. “There Charles Lapointe, the first of our company to die, looked over the edge of the trench. That is death. Machine guns all the day sweep the trench edges. If you raise your hand your fingers will be cut off as by a knife. Well, Lapointe looked over the trench; and nobody knows what he saw. His brother was there to lay him down. He buried him (as we ever must the dead) in a hollow pit in our trench. And the brother had for a time the agony of having to fight and feel the earth over Charley’s breast give under his feet.” He fought in the first line again at Laventie, and there got his first taste of gas. It came while he was trying for a little rest after a turn at guard duty. Some one having stolen the two empty sandbags he had been using for bedding, he spread his overcoat on the ground and pulled a blanket over him. “The sun meantime was shining hotly on the heaps of dead bodies which lay not far outside the trench, and I was glad to cover my head with the blanket to shut out some of the awful stink. And that is how the smell of decaying bodies saved my life. Arthur Robillard, a car conductor back in Montreal, was on guard duty. I was roused by his falling over me. As I sat up something got me by the throat and I began to strangle for my life. The air was rent with awful cries. Many of my comrades lay dying and dead about me. I hurled myself in semi-madness into a huge crater near by in which there was a little water, and I fell in it face down. BLOWN FROM THE TRENCH “The water relieved me a little and I wet my handkerchief in it and covered my face. I crawled out and half blindly sought my chum, who was unconscious, and dragged him to the crater where the water was. I laid him there face downward, and he, too, revived a little, and then we lay waiting for death.” Ten minutes later there was a shouting that announced the approach of the Germans on a charge. Houle, followed by Robillard, ran back into the trench, got his gun and began firing. When the rifle became so hot that it burned his hands he threw it down and began hurling bombs. They were ordered to retreat to the next trench and the Germans began pouring into the vacated one. Houle and his fellows got hold of two machine guns, good for from 560 to 700 shots a minute. “I shall never forget those Germans. When our guns suddenly spoke their front line melted; their second crumpled before this destruction; but on, on, on they came, unflinching, marching with even steps into certain death. We were like lions at bay. It was our lives or the Germans’. Then, as fourteen of us fought together, a bomb dropped amid us, and killed eleven. I came to consciousness, lying in the bottom of a trench, with Roy leaning over me. “‘Are you living yet, Roméo!’ he exclaimed in amazement. I rose dizzily. He and I and one other stood alone among our eleven dead friends.