There was a man quite close to me, digging for all he was worth. Suddenly he went down, and I felt sure that he must have been shot, because the Germans, doubtless hearing our digging, had opened rapid fire on us. I soon found that the poor chap had been shot through the chest, and I went to fetch up our stretcher-bearers. They came, and a doctor came, and the man was carried to the shelter of a neighbouring hedge, where the doctor and the stretcher-bearers did everything they could for him, by the light of an officer’s electric pocket-torch; but he had been mortally wounded in the chest, and he died at the hedge side, in the darkness which was lit only by the light of the torch and the flashes of machine-guns and rifles. The poor fellow was covered up and put on a stretcher and carried back to the billet. This was the first man I had seen killed in action, and it made a very deep impression on me, especially as it happened at night. That picture of the dying soldier under the hedge, with the doctor and the ambulance men striving by the light of the little torch to save him, will, I think, remain in my memory when many of the bigger happenings of the war have faded and are almost forgotten. It is an early and a very sorrowful impression of the days that came just before the beginning of the furious battle of Neuve Chapelle. No one who was in those Neuve Chapelle operations will ever forget the massing of the British forces for the fight. The whole countryside was alive with troops of every sort, and there was the incessant rumble of gun-carriages, ammunition-wagons and heavy motor-lorries, and the tramp of hosts of men on the march. There was a great deal of inevitable noise, but at the same time a sinister and impressive quietness. There was the feeling in the air that something very big was going to happen, and everybody felt on the “edge.” The Kensingtons went on in the night until we got into some reserve trenches, which there had not been time to finish properly. They were simply scoopings in the ground, with the earth thrown up on each side, a rough-and-ready sort of arrangement, affording very little cover and with not enough room for us to lie down--indeed, so shallow were they that when the bombardment began in the morning we were actually lying one on top of the other. The bombardment which opened the battle of Neuve Chapelle began fairly early, and it is no exaggeration to say that when the immense number of guns began crashing it was hell let loose. The very earth shook, and no part of the country where we were seemed to escape from the shattering effects of the shells of every sort which were bursting all around us, a great many of them in the air. Some shells fell into the reserve trenches, and many of our fellows were hit.