I am afraid there is nothing clairvoyant about me. I had no premonition whatsoever on leaving pleasant Beauval of the momentous episode so very nearly ahead in my life. I was all recollection then of the fine time I had had. I wanted to linger mentally with it as long as I could. Probably most delicious memory of all to the trench-worn, trench-soiled man I had been was that of the hot baths I enjoyed in Beauval. And the cold showers! I went in for about four of them the first day in and held that average pretty nearly every other day of our rest. Well, that and all the other pleasant things were over, and back we were to the dirty, old trenches, back we were with our old comrades, the rats and moles, and Old Man Death blinking at us from the other side of No Man’s Land. We got back in the trenches on the afternoon of November 15th, and we hadn’t been there but two hours when I received an order to report at Col. Reynold’s headquarters. It was a neat little dug-out he had, as spick and span as the man. The boards walling it were of spotless cleanliness, the desk at which he sat a model of orderliness, the Colonel himself calm and pleasant-voiced. I do not mind admitting that when I left his quarters I was a very solemn-faced young man. All pretty memories of Beauval had been wiped out. I had a large responsibility and a big peril to meet. I reflected that I had come safely through narrow and dangerous ways; my life had been spared so many times in surroundings where it seemed I had no right to hope to survive. The assignment from my Colonel was, in brief, that we had lost touch with the 48th Toronto regiment fighting on our left, that for the time all communications between us had mysteriously stopped. He was unaware whether the 48th had been engaged by the Germans or not. Indeed, he rather feared they had--feared they might have been struck at by a greatly superior force and possibly annihilated. The enemy had cut off telephone communications and what was worse had temporarily assumed an aërial superiority that had cleared our planes out of the sky. The character and size of the German forces directly before us, the strength of their entrenchment, machine guns and field batteries comprised therefore a vital matter of which he was in almost complete ignorance. As to the numerical force of the enemy, we had no thought of waiting to find this out until we were attacked. It had been the British who conducted the offensive and meant just then to continue to do so. But, as an American says, we surely ought to know “what we were up against.” He had given me the task of finding out. Of course, you realize what that meant. I must sneak across No Man’s Land in the night, I must somehow burrow my way into the enemy’s territory, I must remain there long enough to get fairly accurate notes and sketches of the German position and an estimate of his number and artillery.