An officer of the Royal Engineers had gone out to fix up some barbed wire entanglements in front of our trenches. The Germans were firing heavily at the time, and they must have either seen or heard the officer at work. They went for him and struck him down and there he lay in the open. To leave the trenches was a most perilous thing to do, but Mr. Seckham and the two men got out and on to the open ground, and bit by bit they made their way to the Engineer officer, got hold of him, and under a furious fire brought him right along and into our trench, and we gave a cheer which rang out in the night above the firing and told the Germans that their frantic efforts had failed. Mr. Seckham was a splendid officer in every way and we were greatly grieved when, not long afterwards, he was killed. Another of our fine young platoon officers, Lieutenant Townsend, has been killed since I came home. We were so near the Germans at times that we could throw things at them and they could hurl things at us, and we both did, the things being little bombs, after the style of the old hand-grenade. We got up a bomb-throwing class and hurled our bombs; but it was not possible to throw them very far--only twenty-five yards or so. The West Yorkshires, who were near us, got a great many of these missiles thrown at them, but they did not all explode. One day a sergeant of ours--Jarvis--was out getting wood when he saw one of them lying on the ground. He picked it up and looked at it, then threw it down and instantly it exploded, and he had no fewer than forty-three wounds, mostly cuts, caused by the flying fragments, so that the bomb made a proper mess of him. Our own bombs were made of ordinary pound jam tins, filled with explosive and so on, like a little shell, which, as the case of the sergeant showed, was not anything like as sweet a thing to get as jam. The [Illustration: [_To face p. 102._ “WE WERE SO NEAR THE GERMANS THAT THEY COULD HURL BOMBS AT US.”] Germans were very fond of flinging these hand-bombs and seemed to have a great idea of their value in attacks and defence. Christmas Eve was with us, Christmas Day was soon to dawn--and what a strange and terrible Christmas it was to be! On Christmas Eve itself we plainly heard the Germans shouting. “A merry Christmas to you!” they said, and there was no mistaking the German voices that came to us in our trenches out of the darkness. “A merry Christmas to you!” Again the Germans greeted us, though we could not see them, and there was something pathetic in the words, which were shouted in a lull in the fighting. Some of our men answered the wish, but I did not--I had no heart to do so, when I knew that the message meant so little.