[We very slowly learned something of the many extraordinary features of this amazing war. Nothing is too astonishing or stupendous to happen in connection with the fight to crush the militarism of Prussia. Through this story by Private J. Boyers, of the Durham Light Infantry--the old 68th Foot, long known by reason of its devotion on many a bloody field like Salamanca and Inkerman as the “Faithful Durhams”--we get to know something of the British and French fighting side by side in the forts at Lille, one of the strongest of the famous fortresses of France. Lille is a great manufacturing town, the Manchester of France, and early in October 1914, and later, it was the scene of much desperate fighting between the Allied Armies and the Germans.] I went from England with the first party in the Expeditionary Force, and after landing on the other side of the Channel, we had a march of fifty miles to Mons, where I had my first battle. I was in the great retirement--but I suppose you have heard enough about that and Mons already, so I will leave it. After that beginning, I took part in the Battle of the Marne and the Battle of the Aisne, and later on I was shot in the thigh and bowled out. I am only a young soldier--I am a native of Sunderland, and was born in 1891--and I have only been in the army a few months--in the old 68th, the “Faithful Durhams,” so I think I have seen a fair lot of the big war and have got to know what it means. The Durhams have done splendidly and suffered terribly, and many a chum of mine is sleeping with thousands more British soldiers on the battlefields of France and Belgium. A great many have been wounded, and of course there are a number of missing, mostly men, I dare say, who are prisoners of war. I had been at sea before joining the army, and thought I knew something about roughing it; but even the North Sea in bad weather was nothing compared with the hardships of the retirement from Mons, and the living and sleeping in the trenches when the ground was sodden and deep in water. Sometimes we were very short of food, and once for several days on end we were almost starving, because the supplies could not get up to us, and we had been forced to throw away a lot of our packs and things.