That night I was assigned to outpost duty between the lines. The German artillery had so covered the roads and the bridge, that for two days the supply wagons had been unable to come up. I was almost starved. My stomach ached incessantly from sheer hunger and I was weak from the bleeding of my wound. It seems terrible, looking back at it, but, during the night, while my partner watched, I crawled out and searched the dead for rations. I found none. Fifty paces from our post lay a dead artillery horse. We had to eat--or drop. What could we do? Wriggling on my belly like a snake, I drew myself toward the smelling carcass, cut off enough with my jackknife to do the section, brought it back, and we ate it. There followed days of lying in the trenches. Every time one of us showed a head above the surface of the earth a single shot would ring out, and more than once it accomplished its mission. Two or three times I almost caught it myself. At last I made up my mind that the sniper must be in a sugar factory building which showed clearly above a ridge on the right front of our position. Jock Hunter and I volunteered to go there and investigate. Working our way under cover of a wooded patch, we reached the factory yard where we encountered an old Frenchman who seemed to be the owner of the place. "What do you want?" he demanded. "Have you seen a sniper anywhere about here?" I asked. "No," he answered in a surly manner, "and you get out of here." "We'll get out," I retorted, "and _you'll_ get with us." I searched the factory building from cellar to roof but wasn't able to discover anything incriminating. I didn't know much about sugar factories, but there was a lot of machinery in the place that didn't look to me as if it had anything to do with sugar. Back to our lines we went, with the supposed Frenchman making a lot of noise, but walking about two inches in front of the points of our bayonets. When he was searched we found notes to the value of fifteen thousand francs sewed in his clothes, but most important of all, there were papers upon his person which showed that he was a German spy left there by the Prussians in 1871. He held title to many acres of land, including some of the quarries where shells had been hidden. I told the company officer of the suspicious-looking machinery in the factory. He sent us back there with a subaltern of the engineers. The three of us approached the building by different routes. Suddenly, from a narrow window in the tower of the structure, a rifle cracked, and I saw the subaltern duck behind a bush. Hunter and I each began to run toward the factory. Zip! A bullet whistled past my ear, and a few seconds later Hunter was fired at.