fire that devoured them as they met it, a fire that it was humanly impossible for any troops to withstand, turned back and sought the shelter of their trenches, leaving their dead and wounded piled and sprawled by the hundreds on the ground they had failed to cross. The casualties among the Canadian troops were not large, and they had occurred mostly before the charge had been launched, but it was in deep sorrow that the men from across the ocean gathered up from the shattered trenches the pierced and broken bodies of their comrades, and sent them to the rear, the living to be cared for in the hospitals, the dead to be buried on the soil of France where they had bravely fought and nobly died. CHAPTER XII The great Somme drive began on July 1, 1916, after a week's devastating bombardment of the German lines. The enemy trenches had been torn and shattered, and when the Allied armies, in great numbers and with abundant ammunition, swept out and down upon them, the impetus and force of the advance were irresistible. Trenches were blotted out. Towns were taken. The German lines melted away over wide areas. Victory, decisive and permanent, rested on the Allied banners. On the third of the month the British took La Boiselle and four thousand three hundred prisoners. But on the fourth the enemy troops turned and fought like wild animals at bay. This was the day on which Aleck received his wounds. In the morning, as they lay sprawled in a ravine which had been captured the night before, waiting for orders to push still farther on, Aleck had said to Pen: "You know what day this is, comrade?" "Indeed I do!" was the reply, "it's Independence Day." "Right you are. I wish I could get sight of an American flag. It will be the first time in my life that I haven't seen 'Old Glory' somewhere on the Fourth of July." "True. Back yonder in the States they'll be having parades and speeches, and the flag will be flying from every masthead. If only they could be made to realize that it's really that flag that we're fighting for, you and I, and drop this cloak of neutrality, and come over here as a nation and help us, wouldn't that be glorious?" Pen's face was grimy, his uniform was torn and stained, his hair was tousled; somewhere he had lost his cap and the times were too strenuous to get another; but out from his eyes there shone a tenderness, a longing, a determination that marked him as a true soldier of the American Legion. The cannonading had again begun. Shells were whining and whistling above their heads and exploding in the enemy lines not far beyond. Off to the right, a village in flames sent up great clouds of smoke, and the roar of the conflagration was joined to the noise of artillery. Back of the lines the ground was strewn with wreckage, pitted with shell-holes, ghastly with its harvest of bodies of the slain. With rifles gripped, bayonets ready, hand grenades near by, the boys lay waiting for the word of command. "Aleck?" "Yes, comrade."