I found three wounded men, French, I thought they were, in that gloom. So I carried them into our trench. As I brought in the last one, the officer said, "You are doing good work, Houle." I asked him why he thought so; and he answered: "You have brought in three wounded men and when we put the light on them we found they were Germans." Well, I am glad I saved them. I would have done so anyhow, had I known their nationality. For we were all trained to give a wounded man help, whether he were friend or foe. Yet it is dangerous work, helping a wounded German. I never helped another, after the experience I had. It was one of the two occasions when I knew with certainty that I killed a man. He was a wounded German soldier. We found him suffering and weak. But we knew we could save his life and were dressing his wound. My back was turned. He took a revolver out of his tunic pocket and fired point-blank at me. I do not know how I escaped death. Perhaps it was because his hand shook from weakness; perhaps my guardian saint turned aside that death bullet. Anyhow, he had his revolver in his hand. We had to act quickly. My officer spoke a quick word, and I made sure that he would never fire another shot. Well, we got our machine guns. But the Germans had blown them up, and all our sacrifice of men was in vain. We were relieved by a British regiment before morning and marched back to our billets to have a rest. I slept all the rest of the night until 11 o'clock the next morning. It was the first rest I had had in forty-eight hours, with only a slice of raw bacon and a piece of bread to eat. These were little incidents of the bloody battle at Ypres. That afternoon some of the boys brought out tables from a house and placed them in the sun. The civilian populace, in their flight, had left behind their live stock. We caught some hens and rabbits and cooked them in wine we found in a cellar. Ah, that was a feast. I never had a better one. Yet we were strange feasters. Had some artist been able to paint us he would have had a strong canvas. Some of the boys had their heads bandaged, and nearly all of us were covered with dirt and blood. Some sang for us, though others were downhearted. It surprised me that a few hours after we had faced death and had been suffering untold hardships we could now gather like college boys at a beer night feast and sing. During the rest of that battle we lived in the reserve trenches, bombarded day and night. The battle lasted twenty-one days. When it was over they called a roll of our regiment. There were 500 of us when we left Montreal. As the commander called the roll, name after name was met with no response. At Ypres 480 out of 500 of us were left dead on the field. And in reality our loss had been greater than that, for our 500 had been thinned out in other actions and filled with a full roster again. Twenty of us out of 500 survived at Ypres. VIII--FIGHTING AGAINST BARBARISM