The headquarters staff appeared on the scene. They wanted information, just as ours would have done under similar circumstances, but these took a different method to acquire it. As before, in the trench, they selected me for the spokesman. The senior officer, a general apparently, addressed me: "How many troops are there in front of our attack?" I lied: "I don't know." He shook a threatening finger at me. "I'll tell you this, my man: We have a pretty good idea of how many troops lay behind you and if in any particular you endeavour to lead us astray it will go very hard with all of you. Now answer my question!" His English was good. I cogitated. It would not do to tell him the terrible truth. That was certain. So I took a chance. "Three divisions." He appeared to be satisfied. The fact was, there were none behind us. We were utterly without supporting troops. "And Kitchener's Army? How many of them are there here?" "Why, they haven't even come over yet, sir." "Don't tell me that: I know better. They've been out here for months." "But they haven't," I persisted. I told the truth this time. "Yes," he shouted angrily. "No," I flung back. "Well, how many of them are there?" The division yarn had gone down well. And perhaps I was slightly heated. My spirit ran ahead of my judgment. "Five and a half to seven million," I said. He exploded. And called me everything but a soldier. I could not help but reflect that I had overdone it a bit. And I certainly thought that I was "for it" then and there. To make matters worse he asked the others and they, profiting by my mistake and following the lead of the first man questioned, put Kitchener's army at four and a half million; which was only a trifle of four million out. So I determined to be reasonable. When he came to me again I confirmed the latter figure, explaining my earlier statement by my lack of exact knowledge. And so that particular storm blew over. The general came back to me again. "You Canadians thought this was going to be a picnic, didn't you?" He was very sarcastic. "No, we didn't, sir." "Well, you thought it was going to be a walk through to Berlin, didn't you?" "Why, no. We thought it was the other way about, sir," I ventured. He shifted: "Well, what do you think of us anyhow?" "Your artillery was all right but your infantry was no good." I began to feel shaky again. However, he took that calmly enough. "Oh! So our infantry was no good." "We could have held them all right, sir." He ruminated on that a moment, rumbled in his throat and abruptly changed the subject, in an unpleasant fashion, however. "You're the fellows we want to get hold of. You cut the throats of our wounded."