About five o'clock I espied one of the Newfoundland lieutenants a little way up the beach in charge of a party of twenty men. I signaled to him and he came down to our boat. The party had come to unload the baggage. When I asked the lieutenant about being relieved, he told me that he had sent a corporal and one man down about one o'clock, and ordered me back to the regiment to report to Lieutenant Steele. Half way up the beach we found Lieutenant Steele. The corporal sent down to relieve me, he told me, had been hit by a shell just after he left his dugout. The man with him had not been heard from. I went back to the beach, and found the man perched up on top of the cliff to the right of the lighter. He had been waiting there all the afternoon for the corporal to join him. Having solved the mystery of the failure of the relief party, I returned to my platoon. Their first stopping place had proved untenable. All day they had been subjected to a merciless and devastating shelling, and their first day of war had cost them sixty-five men. They were now dug in in a new and safer position. They were only waiting for darkness to advance to reinforce the firing line that was now about four miles ahead. Since to get to our firing line we had to cross the dried-up bed of a salt lake, no move could be made in daylight. That evening we received our ration of rum, and formed up silently in a long line two deep, beside our dugouts. I fell in with my section, beside Art Pratt, the sandy-haired chap I had met in Aldershot. He had been cleaning his rifle that afternoon when a shell landed right in his dugout, wounded the man next him, knocked the bolt of the rifle out of his hand, but left him unhurt. He accepted it as an omen that he would come out all right, and was grinning delightedly while he confided to me his narrow escape, and was as happy as a schoolboy at the thought of getting into action.