going to do with my wrench what the other fellows did with their bayonets. Lucky it was for my peace of mind in those days that I couldn’t look forward and see what the end of the next eight or ten months had in pickle for me. The call was pretty persistent for men in those first months of the war and, in spite of the shortage of all kinds of equipment, our training was rushed from the very beginning. Most of the boys in my regiment had seen service or had training--some had been in the South African War, and others had been members of the English Territorials or the Canadian Militia--already, and we made much better progress than the rawer contingents that came later. We had about three months in Canada, a little longer in England (where I had a touch of typhoid on Salisbury Plain), and by the early spring of 1915 we were in reserve in Flanders. By the time the Germans made their second attempt to drive through Ypres to Calais we had been pushed up into the first line. Until the big attack came, however, we had had no real fighting. The Germans--I had begun to call them Huns by this time instead of Dutchmen--made scattering raids on our trenches and we made scattering raids on theirs, but I never figured in any of this to the extent of mixing in hand-to-hand work. I had no chances to add any notches to the handle of my old monkey-wrench, but from my always carrying it around with me the English “Tommies” (who call a wrench a spanner) had dubbed me “Spanner Mike.” They pretended to believe I was a little “cracked” about my trusty old friend, but I found that they were never above borrowing it for everything, from opening boxes from home to tinkering the gear of broken-down automobile trucks--“motor lorries,” they call them. It’s really remarkable what a lot of things a man can use a monkey-wrench for if only he happens to have it handy when he needs it. For some days the shell-fire against us had been getting heavier--at least they called it heavy then; it would be nothing now--and we knew that the Huns were getting ready for some kind of an attack. What kind it was going to be we little dreamed, for even our officers seem to have known nothing about the gas they had been experimenting with over in Germany. When it came--it rolled toward us in heavy clouds like the morning mists in the Dakota “Bad Lands”--the word went round that the Huns’ munitions had got afire, and we were telling each other that we ought to be sent across to take advantage of the confusion. It was only when we began to notice that it was bubbling up at fairly regular intervals--thick greasy yellow clouds of it--that it seemed they might be putting up a game on us, and by that time one of the advanced tongues of the stuff lapped over into our trench.