A company of Canadian gunners were practising with a trench-digging machine, invented in England, which had done well on the Somme. Suddenly one of them, to his horror, perceived that a shell which stood among a hundred others was smoking. By some unaccountable means its fuse had caught fire, the match was burning, and in a few seconds, perhaps in one, the shell would burst. Were it to do so, the whole of this store of ammunition must go aloft, with the gunners and us and all. And so this gallant little Canadian who has seen the danger, gives the alarm, and while we flatten ourselves into the mud, picks up the shell in his plucky hands and throws it with all his strength out in front of the battery, where it bursts--and no one a penny the worse. We could have fallen, for very joy, upon the neck of the gallant lad who had just saved all our lives. It would have been so silly to be killed in such a fashion, miles away from the enemy! Farther on they were learning to handle a new trench-mortar. We were privileged to observe a little _barrage_ fire. It made a noble shindy in the fog and a magnificent disturbance of the soil. These guns have been only recently introduced, but they are installing great numbers of them along the whole British front with a view to the winter campaign, for they have been an immense success. The Germans, in this field, at least, of experimental operations, have acquired this information at considerable cost to themselves. In the same way we followed the open-air training of the machine-gun men. More or less every man has to go through it, so that if necessary he may be able to do this work. It is the picked gunners, who have shown what they can do in actual fighting, who teach the beginners the use of this terrible weapon, and it is with a most entertaining air of "the old soldier" that they give their instruction. We saw the periscope rifles at work, the bomb-throwing and grenade-throwing rifles and other strange and terrible weapons of which one may not tell. What a rare museum we will be able to make up after the war! The collections of arms from the Middle Ages will sink into insignificance beside it. It would appear that for inventing ways of killing his fellows, the imagination of Man knows no bounds. We came upon some sturdy Canadians, their hats stuck in their belts. A stout band of leather was round their heads. Slung across his shoulders one carried two heavy boxes loaded with shells; another, without any effort, carried one of his comrades. These exercises were explained to us in this way. "It is the method of the Red Indians that the Canadians have cleverly adapted to the purposes of supplying their trenches or carrying their wounded. With it, one has no need to be a Hercules." With this system, strength yields to skill. They showed us a man who can in this way walk easily with a piano on his back. "It would come in handy for shifting a broken-down tank!" said our guide with a grin.