If you want to imagine what a bullet wound feels like try and think that you have got it and then imagine what it is to be carried over the bumpy road, dumped down time after time, so that your bearers may drop on the ground and live to carry you out. The Huns fire on everything that moves, and every time a flare rises, down your bearers must drop or run the certainty of being sniped. Sometimes in a big action men will lie for days, some with desperate wounds, sniped at if they show the slightest movement, and then comes the journey from the dressing station along a road raked with shell fire. Just try and imagine it, and if you see a soldier back from hell kicking over the traces, and going a little bit wild, just think of what he has been in and endured. In my case the sight of these casualties caused me to shiver, for there I was in perfect health and strength, yet how long before I would be like one of these boys! However, we were not given much time for thinking. "Keep absolutely quiet and no talking," was the whispered command that was passed among us. The blackness of the night made seeing anything clearly absolutely impossible. No smoking was permitted and if a machine gun opened on the road we were to throw ourselves flat. This was most encouraging as the road had a beautiful layer of nice clinging mud, while pools of water, from two to ten feet deep, were scattered everywhere. We were all green troops and when the "plut-plut-ping" began over our heads, the ducking would have done credit to Jim Corbett. By and by we steadied up, especially as we heard some British Tommies, who were returning from their spell in front, enjoying a quiet laugh at our expense. However, as one of them put it, "The'll get used tew it lad, we were as bad at start. Goot neet." "Silence there!" from our Old Man. I had a kind of "home and mother" feeling in my stomach and I expected every minute to hear the machine guns begin to bark. We had been told that a strip of railway about two hundred yards from the trenches was a veritable death trap, the Allemands peppering it about every hour. It was on the road to our trenches, so we were obliged to go over it. When we came to the spot I fancied that that strip of land was about a mile across instead of about ten yards. Judge of our astonishment, when the door of a house opened and a woman came out and stood calmly watching us pass, mind you, only two hundred yards from our own front lines and three hundred yards from the Germans. And there I was trying to make myself as small as a midget, and she standing calmly erect as if butterflies instead of bullets were flying around. Thought I, "If that woman can stand like that, surely I can at least walk erect." I did so, but it was a terrible effort.