“Ah, there was the first ‘over-the-top’ experience, when you stood on the fire-step with gun in hand, palefaced, but with clenched teeth, in an oppressive silence, waiting to hear the command come down the line,—whispered from mouth to mouth. Then you leaped wildly over into long-anticipated perils, to become entangled in barbed wire, or perhaps to get your first shock, as the man next you dropped like lead at the first ‘ptt’ of a German sharpshooter’s bullet. “But on you rush in a mad frenzy with red-misted eyes, in the face of a heavy artillery fire and a pitiless gale of shrapnel, through a dense smoke-screen, split with lurid flashes of flame, over a ground pitted with shell-holes—to stumble over some dead Tommy, whose glazed eyes stare up at you as if in mockery of your determination to play the man in this crusade for humanity. “Then _my adventure_ came,—a raid on a German trench, an undertaking attended with great peril. With blackened faces, each man, with his bag of bombs and automatic, at the flicker of a white light crawled stealthily into the sable blackness of ‘dead man’s yard,’ and, in a downpour of drenching rain, crept on hands and knees, sometimes wiggling on his stomach,—quickly rolling into a shell-hole if a sound was heard,—until the German trench loomed menacingly only a few feet beyond. “Everything was deadly still. Then the signal came, and with a rush we clambered stealthily up and peeped over, to see a yellow-haired Heinie asleep in the little alcove back of his gun-emplacement, the head of the sentry-on-post tipsily nodding on his chest, and two big fellows snoring like porpoises on the floor near. In just one minute we had slid into that trench and had our men with hands up. Sure it was a surprise-party for Fritz, for the Germans came running out of their dug-outs, wrapped in blankets, noisily demanding to know what was up. They soon knew, and then came a riot of a time as we let our hand-grenades fly, and our bayonets too, aided by a lively fire from our machine-guns. And then we were out, making a quick run for our own trenches with our trophies, and several of the surprised ones, with the German guns thundering in our rear. “Yes, I had captured my first Hun, and mighty proud I was of my achievement, and pictured my delight-to-be when retailing my adventure to my comrades, when Zipp! and I was downed by the pieces of a bursting shell that got me in the hand and foot. And the prisoner? Oh, the dirty Boche saw his chance. I saw his hand go up,—he must have had a stiletto hidden somewhere,—but I was too quick for him for I let fly a hand-grenade, and—well, he bothered me no more.