Shortly after this we were taken back of the line a few miles and reorganized, and in a few days we were back in the trenches again. The battalion went in at Courcelette a night or two before me, and such a place it was. The German artillery had made it a veritable hell-hole. What was once a pretty town was now a pile of bricks with a sunken road running through it, and leading down to a cemetery. When I went in with a Stokes gun, the 28th held the graveyard; such a time as we had getting in. We were shelled all the way, and the nearer we came to Courcelette the hotter it got. Finally we reached that sunken road and it was strewn with dead bodies, our lads and Germans. We started to set up our gun in the bank beside the road, and how we did dig. The shells were tearing up everything around us, and Tommy Lowe and I dug like demons. Our crew had three casualties almost immediately, two wounded and one killed. We got our gun set up, but as we were short of ammunition we had to wait for a counter-attack before we were allowed to fire. The 31st made an attack that morning, but got hung up on the German wire entanglements and lost heavily. When daylight came things were still hot. Sergeant Faulkner, who had just come back, after recovering from his second wound, for his final one that morning. "Carry on," he said; "I'm done." A little bunch of the 28th were holding the cemetery and expecting a counter-attack any moment. McMurchie was there in his glory. "Let the devils come," said he, "I'll chase them back with me entrinchin' tool handle." The wounded were lying around everywhere, and Tommy Lowe, Danny Dugan and I carried them up that road to the dressing-station. All forenoon the German snipers were on our track, and we had to hug the bank all the way up. The shell fire had died down, though our artillery was still giving the Germans a heavy shelling. When Tommy and I got tired we lay down in a shell hole, but the sun was hot and the odour from the dead bodies was so awful we had to move on.