With death threatening behind you can perform marvels and it is my only explanation of how I ever made the journey I did. I can’t attempt to tell this journey in detail. It was a nightmare of pain and horrors, myself more like a sleepwalker than anything else as I endured its hardships. As I think back on it, it seems to me that I was always swaying, always stumbling. But I remember finding myself well out in No Man’s Land and prone on my back where I had blindly fallen. Then the reek of the dead brought me staggering to my feet and to my senses. I looked about me like a frightened, bewildered child. The things I saw were so horrible--the dead, sprawled as they were struck down, distorted, maimed in so many ways, made a spectacle so awful that I cried out: “Good God! I’m not going to become one of these. God help me! I must not. God help me.” And I went tottering along. And that is why I have said that if it were not for the dead I would not be now among the living. For whenever my strength seemed altogether spent, whenever I began telling myself it was no use, that I’d have to give up, my eyes would turn upon the constant spectacle of the dead in No Man’s Land, as the bursting lights in the sky revealed them. Some of them were headless. Some hung grotesquely on patches of barbed-wire entanglement that had not been smashed down by the shells of previous battle, some--but detail of this sort is perhaps too frightful to even simply describe. All I know is that every time I was ready to surrender, the sight of these piteous dead men nerved me to go on. I would not join them. I would not become as they were. I would not fall and lie there to fester and rot, to become a noisome thing. Positively, unreservedly, it was these men, who had already given their lives for their countries, whom I have to thank for the preservation of my own. Their grim presence drove me on and on. Evidently I had escaped from my mud-hole unobserved by the enemy. No bullets had sung after me; there had never been a sign of pursuit. But now I had to consider a new danger. Weak as I was, feeling that every next step must be my last, I realized that it would not do for me to go marching straight for the Canadian trenches which I knew to be almost straight beyond. The 48th Toronto battalion were there. In such case, I might expect them to do for me what the Germans had failed to do. I might expect a clutter of bullets to strike me down. They could not know me from a Boche. I was caked all over with mud. I was a strange figure. And I well knew that so many had been the schemes and strategies of the Boche spies that in all probability the Canadians would shoot first and inquire regarding me afterward. I had to rake my confused mind for a recollection of the lay of the land along the trenches, for a recollection of the secret paths by which they might be flanked and then approached. I never put in a greater effort of will. And finally I remembered.