In this same village we found a white-haired blacksmith--he must have been all of seventy years--tied to his anvil. His hands had been beaten to a pulp. They were held together by a bayonet thrust through his wrists. And on his anvil, weighted with a horseshoe, was a note in German which read: “You will never shoe another horse belonging to our enemies.” I was shortly afterward to kill a German on whom I found a letter evidently just written and ready for mailing wherein he told of a score of atrocities in which he had participated. He described the horrors as “great sport.” One sprightly paragraph told of murdering four women at St. Julien while carrying out orders to loot all homes of every ornament and article of practical device containing brass, steel or copper. In this instance, as of others, he said the looting had been “great sport,” a phrase he seemed very fond of. But quite astonishingly his heart had been moved when the four women, one of whom they shot and the other three they bayoneted, had fallen on their knees and begged for mercy. He wrote that he was rather uneasy in his mind about that, but at the same time said that he had gathered from their home some very valuable and interesting “souvenirs.” Good God! “Souvenirs!” My first contact with the Germans was at Whytecheat. I was given 80 men with instructions to take the “skyline” trench ahead. A skyline trench means just what it says--the enemy trench on the horizon. It was a night attack. It was a dangerous trench. The Warwicks had three days before taken it and then been blown to annihilation. This sort of thing was constantly happening, I was told. The British with bayonets could rout any bunch of Germans out of any trench. But at that time German artillery was far superior. As a matter of fact at that time the English batteries were given daily only six shells for each gun and barrage fire was unknown. No British gun might fire a shell without a particular objective view. There could be no general storm of shells sent at any suspected point. It was necessary for my commanders to know what was beyond that first-line trench, what there might be in machine-gun and “pill-box” emplacements, how strong a force might meet a general charge of our special contingent. As a trained soldier, I was therefore detailed to make this raid. No Man’s Land at this junction of the fighting line was fully 500 yards wide. The Germans had so effectually blasted all other attacks on the skyline trench, and our artillery had been so weak in its retorts that the enemy figured themselves secure. No star-shells were glaring over No Man’s Land as we made our way across. But we were cautious. It took us all of three hours, starting at midnight, before we came to the first line of enemy barbed-wire. We nipped it down successfully and still without discovery went through the second wire barrier.