At night the Germans threw a searchlight on the “Devil’s Corner,” and as soon as ever they saw us appear they shelled us, sometimes as many as four shells coming together; but we dashed on so furiously that they could not get us, nor did they catch us when we ran the gauntlet coming back, though they used to get an average of a wagon a night. In addition to this deadly corner we had three burnt villages to tackle; but we were always lucky, and our men did not come to grief. We used to go right up to the trenches, only about twenty-five yards from them, with the horses and wagons, and there was one specially dangerous spot which had to be passed. This was where there was a gap in a hedge, which the Germans knew of quite well and could see. They knew that at night our troops went to the gap to get water, and so in the daytime they trained machine-guns on the spot, and when darkness came they blazed away in the hope of wiping some of our men out. I have known these guns whirr for five minutes without a break, sending out a fire so horrible that nothing could live under it. We lost several men at this gap, and were forced to make an opening in the hedge somewhere else. We got into reserve trenches, and here it was that a “whistling Willy,” which is our nickname for a small German shell, went clean through a Seaforth and then killed one of our own men in the trenches. The shell passed through the Highlander intact, and did not explode until it reached the trenches, a circumstance which shows the amazing performances of projectiles in this war. You never know what they will do. At another time one of our chaps, named Steel, was having his hair cut, when a shell exploded near him and a piece of it, six inches long, like a needle, struck him through the heart and killed him on the spot. The winter was a very rough time for us, as we could not keep the water out of the trenches, and we often had to sleep standing up, during a four days’ spell in the trenches. Often enough, at the end of one of these hard spells, we were intensely disappointed because we could not be relieved, owing to troops being moved elsewhere, and we were forced to stick it for an extra four days; but we did not forget to make up for it when we were out, although we had to march a few miles to our billets to rest, and even then we were not free from shell fire. By the time I had been at the front seven months I think I had seen almost every phase of this tremendous war; but I had yet a lot to learn of what the war means, and I began to learn afresh when we got to Ypres and later on had a dose of poison-gas. None of the sights I had seen were to be compared with what we witnessed in the famous and beautiful old city, which the enemy had reduced to ruins. They had used shells of every sort, and I saw many evidences of the havoc and death that had been brought about on innocent people.