Arthur Robillard, a car conductor back in Montreal, was on guard duty. I was roused when he fell over me. As I sat up something got me by the throat and began to strangle out my life. The air was rent with awful cries. Many of my comrades lay dying and dead about me. I hurled myself in semi-madness into a huge crater near by, made by a bursting shell. There was a little muddy water at the bottom, and I fell in it, face down. The water relieved me a little, and I wet my handkerchief in it and covered my face. The green, stinking air was thus shut out, and I began to breathe easier. I crawled out, and half blindly sought my unconscious chum, dragging him back ten yards into the crater where the water was. I laid him face downward there, and he, too, revived a little, and there we lay, waiting for death. Ten minutes later, I heard a shouting, and knew that the Germans were coming fast. Then I ran back into my trench, got my gun, and began firing as fast as I could. The rifle soon became so hot that it burned my hands. I threw it down and began throwing bombs. The order to retreat to the next trench came. My half-strangled comrade was with me. We ran together and, looking back, saw the big, strapping gray fellows of the Teuton army leaping down into our trench. I forgot the rheumatism from which I had been suffering for several days when I saw them come, (we all suffer from rheumatism, it is one of the curses of the trenches). Meanwhile, the French had retired to their fourth line, and we were left, almost surrounded, with our left flank exposed and annihilation threatening us. Somehow we got hold of two machine-guns, and placed them where they would do the most good. One of these was running 560 shots a minute, and the other--blessed French destroyer!--was pouring out death at the rate of 700 shots a minute. IV--"I SHALL NEVER FORGET THOSE GERMANS" I shall never forget those Germans. When our guns suddenly spoke their front line melted; their second crumpled before this destruction; but on, on, on they came, unflinching, marching with even steps into certain death. We were like lions at bay. It was our lives or the Germans'. Then, as fourteen of us fought together, a bomb dropped amid us, and killed eleven. I came to consciousness, lying in the bottom of a trench, with Roy leaning over me. "Are you living, Roméo!" he exclaimed in amazement. I rose dizzily. He and I and one other stood alone among our eleven dead friends. Then Roy told me that I had been blown clear of the trench, twenty feet from where I stood, and that he had braved death to secure, as he supposed, my dead body. A careful examination showed that my only injury was a terrible bruise on the calf of my leg, where the round surface of a flying shard had struck me, but without breaking the skin. Miracles are but small matters when you fight in the presence of death.