“Too bad Gault is not here. He’s in England recovering from his wound. Gault is six feet tall and five feet of him legs. All day in that trench with a shell wound in his thigh and arm. God! How he was suffering! But not a moan--his face twitching and trying to make the twitch into a smile--and telling us to stick.” “Buller away, too. He was the second in command. Gault succeeded him. Buller was hit on May 5th--and missed the big show--piece of shell in the eye.” “And Charlie Stewart, who was shot through the stomach. How we miss him. If ever there were a ‘live-wire’ it’s Charlie. Up or down, he’s smiling and ready for the next adventure. Once he made thirty thousand dollars in the Yukon--and spent it on the way to Vancouver. The first job he could get was washing dishes--but he wasn’t washing them long. Again he started out in the Northwest on an expedition with four hundred traps to cut into the fur business of the Hudson’s Bay Company. His Indians got sick; he wouldn’t desert them--and before he was through he had a time which beat anything yet opened up for us by the Germans in Flanders--but you have heard such stories from the Northwest before. Being shot through the stomach the way he was all the doctors agreed that Charlie would die. It was like Charlie to disagree with them. He always has his own point of view. So he is getting well. Charlie came out to the war with the packing-case which had been used by his grandfather, who was an officer in the Crimean War. He said that it would bring him luck.” The 4th of May was bad enough--a ghastly forerunner for the 8th. On the 4th the P. P’s, after having been under shell-fire throughout the second battle of Ypres--the “gas battle”--were ordered forward to a new line to the southeast of Ypres. To the north of Ypres the British line had been driven back by the concentration of shell-fire and the rolling, deadly march of the clouds of asphyxiating gas. The Germans were still determined to take the town which they had showered with four million dollars’ worth of shells. It would be big news--the fall of Ypres as a prelude to the fall of Przemysl and of Lemberg. A wicked salient was produced in the British line to the southeast by the cave-in to the north. It seems to be the lot of the P. P’s to get into salients. On the 4th they lost 28 men killed and 98 wounded from a gruelling all-day shell-fire and stone-walling. That night they got relief and were out for two days, when they were back in the front trenches again. The 5th and the 6th were fairly quiet; that is, what the P. P’s or Mr. Thomas Atkins would call quiet. Average mortals wouldn’t. They would try to appear unconcerned and say they had been under pretty heavy fire--which means shells all over the place and machine guns combing the parapet. Very dull, indeed. Only three men killed and seventeen wounded.