However, he remembered an old friend, a major of Engineers in charge of a company at a China station, and he immediately hurried from San Francisco across the Pacific to Hong-Kong, where he found the --th Siege Company, R.E., under orders to move, and cursing destiny, in the shape of the British War Office, which refused to allow them to be in at the fall of Tsing-tau. Forthwith he attached himself to them. His sole qualification consisted of an erratic but handy knowledge of mechanics, picked up here and there--as chauffeur to a Vancouver millionaire, as a greaser, ganger, and a stoker, but principally during eighteen months of desultory employment in the machine-shops of Pittsburg. After much argument concerning the King's Regulations with regard to recruits and the position of a man in the ranks, the major had taken him on the strength as mechanic for the three motor-cycles owned by his command. In September, 1914, he left the Western theatre of war--quietly exultant, as I imagine. He was curiously frank as to his attitude towards the war. "I have always liked big things, and I had to get into this somehow," he said, finishing a large _cassis_. "This war is the biggest thing that ever happened to this old world, and if I were left out of it I should go mad--I should, or commit suicide. That's how I feel about it. Looking on is no good to me; I have to be right in it. But I've illusions. Neither your cause nor the Germans' nor the newspaper gas of both parties interest me. If the Allies hadn't adopted me I should have squeezed somehow into one of the armies of the Central Powers. Of course, the party I joined, that party I stick to; you can count on me to the last drop of my blood. But you take me--I've no patriotism, as you understand these things." They landed in France early in October, and within forty-eight hours were with a corps at a point where the British forces lay resting after the Marne and the Aisne. With those battles the operations passed the mobile phase and began to settle down to the stagnation of the trenches. The novel conditions of warfare in the earth demanded new methods and ingenious adaptations, and soon the Engineers found themselves overwhelmed with orders from corps headquarters and harassed by perplexed divisions and brigades. Bombs and explosive missiles of all sorts were in great demand, but materials other than Tickler's jam-pots were not to be procured. And pumps were wanted; emplacements, redoubts, trenches, field works of all descriptions required overseers from the Engineers to superintend the working-parties, composed of uninitiated infantry. III--CATAPULT THAT HURLS BOMBS