You've no idea until you get into the thick of a fight with shrapnel whistling past you and shells bursting a few feet away, how much depends on your leader. It's up to him to win or lose the ground you're holding for all you're worth. The men in charge of us were young and some of them pretty green at the war game--but say! there wasn't a bloody Hun alive that could scare them! Not by a long sight! We sailed in August, about two thousand of us. We had a quiet trip across and, oh, Christmas! how we did long to get into the scrap! They landed us at a French port and we had just three days' training before we were ordered up. You can't make much headway in three days to prepare you to meet the Boches, but we did manage to get in a little drilling and skirmishing. All the bayonet charging I learned was from a Jap in my company. He was a funny little cuss. Why he joined up I can't imagine. You'd think he would rather save his skin and stay at home, but he was all for fighting. He had been trained in Japan and had joined the Canadians at the last minute. My cousins and I learned all we knew from him. He seemed glad to show us. He was a friendly little chap and some fighter! I remember seeing him alongside of me for a few seconds in a trench full of Germans . . . and then not seeing him. What became of him I never knew. You don't, most of the time. A long line of troop trains were awaiting us. Pullmans? I guess not!--freights. We piled in. We were all anxious to get to the front. We knew they were in desperate need of men and that we might get a chance to go over the top, green as we were. It was night before they opened the doors and let us out. We seemed to be in a sort of meadow. It was black as a cave, except for the lights of the station. There was plenty of noise as two thousand men alighted, but there was another sound--a dull, thick booming . . . cannons! It seemed thousands of miles away, but you never forgot it for an instant. It meant that we fellows who had been so recently in offices plugging away for so much a week were out there at last on the great battlefield of France! We had reached the trenches. They weren't at all like I supposed they'd be. I expected them to be narrow, with room enough for one man only. Instead two and sometimes three could walk abreast. It seemed to me as though we marched a hundred miles that night. I was so tired I was ready to drop, and then all the mud I had ever read about seemed to be planted in that trench! Mud! We tramped through knee-deep slime--knee-deep, mind you--and we thought that was bad until we went in up to our waists. It must have been raining pitchforks before we arrived, and as we scuffed along the best way we could it began again--a cold, driving rain straight down from the black sky, stinging our faces and running down our necks. After a while we halted for the night.