Just then one of the battalion runners came up, with a bleeding hand, saying that his mate had just been killed down the path. I took the two first aid men attached to the company and we went down and found Harris, my own runner, lying by the coil of telephone wire he had been laying, with a great hole in the side of his head--a horrible thing to look at. I stopped only long enough to see a dressing applied and a stretcher brought, and then hastened down the path to D Cos. headquarters, where a phone had been installed. I found Fleischmann shooting off all the fireworks that would go off--about one in ten--and his first sergeant grinding the bell handle of the field phone like mad. To make things pleasanter, our artillery dropped a couple of shells neatly among our outguards. We sent back runners to B. H. Q., and the shells stopped. We never found out who was responsible for that one-pounder. Our own was far in the rear, and the outfits on either side--the 90th Division on the right, the 312th Inf. on the left--disclaimed any knowledge of it. So headquarters solved the problem, as usual, by telling us we were green at this game and didn’t know what we were talking about. It seemed so pitifully unnecessary about Harris. He was such a handsome, bright, intelligent and cheery little chap, a favorite with all the company; and we carried him off with half his face torn away, moaning and unconscious. I never dreamed he could live. But somehow they pulled him through and I have just had a card from him today, from Walter Reed Hospital, where he is yet. The nearest first aid post was at Bn. Hdq., and we had to carry all our wounded back those two long kilometers through the woods, with only the rough dressings that we could apply on the spot. For our rations we had to go back another two kilos, to Rgt’l Hdq., making four kilos each way, nearly all the way through woods and under shell fire. The continual wetness, exposure and loss of sleep made us easy prey to dysentery, and this weakened us a great deal. Under these conditions, to have to carry a stretcher or a can of stew several kilos in the dark was--well, it was just hell. I think the ration parties had the worst job, though their loads were not so heavy as the stretcher bearers’ were. The latter were held up by sympathy for the poor devil on the stretcher. There isn’t much inspiration in a can of slum or a bag of bread.