This story reveals in all its realism the reason why America entered the Great War--to save the world from the suffering herein described. Every American who reads this story will be aroused as never before against the German War despots who forced this horror upon civilization. To bring this war to an end the Americans crossed the seas to fight with the Allies--and save humanity. This true story of the trenches is undeniably one of the most thrilling human documents that the great struggle has produced. Roméo Houle was born in New Bedford, Mass., Oct. 29th, 1893, the son of a local barber, Zacharie Houle, and Xeline Bagnoche. He has a common school education. He moved to Montreal in 1912, where he was a barber. When war was declared he enlisted in the Sixty-fifth Regiment, First Canadian Division, Aug. 10, 1914. His father secured the young soldier's discharge through Congressman Walsh of Massachusetts on the ground that he was an American citizen and was not of age when he enlisted. He made notes of his experiences while in the trenches, and the subjoined production was written by him for _Current History_ in collaboration with his friend Arthur L. Bouvier, editor of a French newspaper at New Haven. I--TRUE STORY OF THE "GERMAN PLAGUE" The true story of the trenches has never been told. I know, because for many months I have lived in trenches. I have slept daily in dread of bullet, shrapnel, mine, and deadly gas; and nightly in fear of mine and gas--and the man-eating rats. I am one of the few soldiers living who entered the front trenches at the opening of the war and who lived to fight the Germans in the front trenches in February, 1916. Of my original company (the Fourth of the Fourteenth Battalion, Third Brigade, First Canadian Division), which marched away to that hell at Laventie and Ypres so gaily--500 brave boys--I am one of the sixteen who survive.... Who has seen hell? Who has experienced the horrors of Milton's terrible vision or the slow tortures of Dante's inferno? God! If Dante's dream madness were truth, and those seven circles were seven encircling battle lines in Northern France or the torn fringe of brave little Belgium, I could stand up and say there is no agony of body or mind which I have not seen, which I have not experienced. I thank God and give Him the glory that I still am sane. Gas? What do you know of it, you people who never heard earth and heaven rock with the frantic turmoil of the ceaseless bombardment? A crawling yellow cloud that pours in upon you, that gets you by the throat and shakes you as a huge mastiff might shake a kitten, and leaves you burning in every nerve and vein of your body with pain unthinkable; your eyes starting from their sockets; your face turned yellow-green.