Every other man seemed to fall. As I fought I marveled that I was spared. And again came to me the belief that my life was charmed; that the bullet had not been melted, the shrapnel not been loaded, the gas not mixed which would cause my death. An ecstatic confidence buoyed me up. I was brave, because I was so sure of life, while all my comrades seemed groveling in death. My platoon was under a withering fire, before which we crumpled and melted away. We left the trench, pressing forward. All hell seemed to rise suddenly from the bowels of the earth and pour over us flame and molten lead. The ground seethed from the exploding shells. The mitrailleuses vomited death. Our thinned lines gave a yell. I saw a black hole in the ground. Sergeant Albert Pichette shouted, "Into their trench!" I leaped in. Four Germans were trying to escape on the further side. I did not fire, intending to make them prisoners. But the only thing I took was a great blow on the side of my head, and away went my prisoners. I crawled up the trench a few feet and came upon two men trying to strangle each other. I thought, then, of motion pictures I had watched back home. Here was a more terrible drama than ever the movie camera showed. A bayonet charge is a street fight magnified and made ten thousand times more fierce. It becomes on close range almost impossible to use your bayonets. So we fought with fists and feet, and used our guns, when possible, as clubs. We lay in our prize trench for about four hours. The boys, excited because they still lived, sang and jested, and told of queer experiences and narrow escapes they had had. By 10 o'clock came the story that the British had lost four field guns and asked our help to recapture them. I was one of twenty-one from my company who volunteered to go. So we joined men from the Tenth and Sixteenth Battalions, and at 11 o'clock prepared to storm the wood where the cannons were. We had only forty yards of open ground to cover, but the German artillery and machine guns worked havoc among us. It did not take us long to run those forty yards. We were soon in the wood, where it was so dark that we could hardly distinguish friend from foe. I ran in and out among the trees and asked every one I met who he was. I came upon one big fellow. My mouth opened to ask him who he was, when his fist shot out and took me between the eyes. I went down for the count, but I knew who he was--he was a German. I got up as quickly as I could, you may be sure, and swung my rifle to hit him in the head, but the stock struck a tree and splintered. I thought I had broken all my fingers.