"I'm not afraid now," I told Roy. And from then on I and all my soldier friends believed my life was charmed and that the Germans could not kill me. We were driven back before their heavy guns to the fourth line, and were almost immediately told in haste to leave it as quickly as we could. Our engineers had mined the place, and as we fled the Germans poured down a gray horde of men. So we blew them up. Have you ever seen a thousand men hurled to atoms by a giant blast? I cannot forget that awful sight. The whole earth seemed to leap skyward, and through and through the black mountain of earth and stones shot heads and arms and legs, torn fragments of what were once heroic men. Next to the gas which they gave us, I think our blowing them up like this was surely the worst thing men could do to men. Perhaps you have heard of the friendship which often springs up between the Allies and their foes. I know something about it. It was at Laventie that the Germans began to amuse themselves by putting a bullseye on a biscuit box and letting us use it for a target. We then returned the compliment and set up a similar bullseye for the Teuton boys. For between Germans and Allies as individuals, there is no hate, though I must except the treacherous German prisoner I had to kill to save my life. Every time the Germans made a bullseye, I would raise a shovel. If they missed, I put up a handkerchief. They did the same for us. And so we who sought each other's lives played together, and death spoke sharply all around. Sergeant Pichette was a wag. He put an old derby on a stick and ran along the trench as if it were a man, and the Germans fired at it. He would pull the hat down occasionally to make the enemy believe that the man under it had been shot, but soon afterward he would raise it again, thereby causing much amusement. We used to talk back and forth--those German boys and we Canadians. They were the 157th and most friendly. "Hi! Where do you come from?" a voice in French once called over to us. "We are French Canadians," we replied with pride. "Well, we're Canadians, too," came the astonishing answer. "We come from Ontario." There came a pause. There was no firing. Then the German shouted, "Let me see one of your group; let him stand above the trench, and on my word of honor we shall not fire." One of us sprang out of the trench and stood up. There fell a deep silence upon the two armies. Then many stood up, and finally the Germans, too, were rising. We talked for hours so, when the officers were not looking. When they looked we did a deal of firing--but our aim was much too high. One day the Germans threw over a bit of paper wrapped around a stone. "If you don't fire on us, we won't fire on you," some one had written. We kept that strange pact for days, until the officers, discovering this pact of peace, moved us to another part of the trenches.