It was a vast change from the comfort and safety of the caverns, where never a German shell reached us, to the open again, but we got our quiet times and little recreations still, and one of these intervals we devoted to football. We were at Messines, and so was a howitzer battery, and as we happened to be rather slack, we got up a match. I am keen on football, and things were going splendidly. I had scored two goals and we were leading 3-1, when the game came to a very sudden stop, for some German airmen had seen us running about and had swooped down towards us, with the result that the howitzer chaps were rushed into action and we followed without any loss of time. We took it quite as a matter of course to let the football go, and pound away at the Germans, who had so suddenly appeared. It was getting rather late, so we gave the enemy about fifty rounds by way of saying good-night. We always made a point of being civil in this direction; but our usual dose for good-night was about fifteen rounds. Talking of football recalls sad memories. On Boxing Day, 1913, when I and an old chum were home on leave, I played in a football match, and at the end of the game a photograph was taken of the team. On last Boxing Day, if the roll of the team had been called, there would have been no answer in several cases--for death and wounds have claimed some of the eleven. Little did we think when we were being grouped for the picture that it was the last muster for us as a team. We had got through the tail end of summer and were well into autumn, and soon the gloom of November was upon us, then came my change of luck and I was knocked out. It was November 2, and almost as soon as it was daylight we were in the thick of an uncommonly furious artillery duel, one of the very worst I have seen. The Germans seemed to be making a special effort that morning. They had got our position pretty accurately, and they fired so quickly and had the range so well that we were in a real hell of bursting shrapnel, indeed, the fragments were so numerous that it is little short of a miracle that we were not wiped out. We had not been long in action when a shell burst on the limber-pole, smashed it in halves, penetrated through the wheel, blew the spokes of the wheel away and shot me some distance into the air. For a little while I had no clear idea of what had happened, then I found that three of us had been wounded. My right boot had been blown to shreds, and there was a hole right through the left boot. So much I saw at once--a mess of blood and earth and leather; but of the extent of my wounds I knew very little, nor did I trouble much about them at the time. The first thing I did was to get into the main pit by the side of the gun, the captain and one or two chums helping me, and there, though the pain of my wounds was terrible, I laughed and chatted as best I could, and I saw how the battery kept at it against big odds.