"Say, Bub, that must be Picric acid that makes our eyes smart so; those shells I bet haven't come more than fourteen hundred yards. Did you see the burst of that last one?" he asked, pointing to the place where a "coal box" had landed. I made no reply; I was too frightened to bother my head about what the shells contained. But Hilliard persisted in getting my opinion about the matter and made me think he was far more interested in that detail than in the fact that it was the most probable thing on earth that he would be dead within a few minutes. However, this situation did not seem to worry him at all; he kept on smoking till the end. I am glad to be able to say, that so far as I know, he came through with only the loss of an arm. --------------------------------------------------------------------- [Illustration: The break on both sides of the Fifth's trenches shows how perilously close they came to being cut off by the enveloping Huns. _See page 174_] --------------------------------------------------------------------- As the ground sloped away toward Ypres we could see for some distance down that way and our hearts bounded as two thin lines of men came toward us in skirmishing order. "Can it be reinforcements?" asked Milliard. "It can be nothing else," said I, and then we witnessed a sight that made us want to cheer with all our might. The coolness of those men was wonderful; steady as a rock they came. They were British regulars, and now you will know why all of us who have been at the front have such an admiration for the British soldier. They trotted steadily in two long lines for about a hundred yards, then down for a brief rest, then up and on again, all done by the arm signals. Officers dropped on every hand, but others instantly took up their duties and like a finely regulated machine on they came--all done under a murderous fire, but never a flinch. It was a marvel of coolness and iron discipline. After witnessing that advance of the Northumberland Fusileers and the Cheshires I have ceased to marvel at the Great Retirement of Mons; those wonderful feats of fighting seem to me now to be the entirely natural thing for the British soldier to do. Suddenly on our left a bedlam of German cheers cleared all doubts of their being through, and the order came for us to retire. Back we went to save ourselves from being flanked. So close a call was it that the last man was only fifty yards from Fritz. Our old major asked our boys to leave him, and of course they refused; but it was by the skin of their teeth they got him out. Thank God the old major is still living and back again with his boys. He refused a comfortable staff billet in England on his recovery. "My place is with the boys," he said, and he is with them today. God bless him!