At first we thought the gas we saw coming toward us was a bank of fog and it gave us no anxiety. It was at 4.30 P.M. that the Huns turned the gas on us, and I was fortunate to be in the first battalion at a point where the gas was not so thick. The thickest part of the gas swept over the 8th, 10th, 11th, 13th, 14th, 15th and 16th battalions. Eighty-five per cent of the men who met this attack were more or less severely gassed. At points the gas was so severe that it turned the brass buttons, on the tunics of the men, green. Some of the men killed by gas fell, but some remained standing even in death so swift was its action. Our artillery, although short of ammunition, was our main support in this action. Had the Germans forced a passage here, the roads to Paris, Calais and the English coast would have been virtually open. There were 72,000 Germans opposed to 13,000 Canadian infantry in this action, but the boys from Canada held fast. The next day, April 23rd, a small fragment of shrapnel in my right hand sent me to the hospital in Boulogne. Fine treatment by the American doctors and nurses there soon had me in shape again and I was returned to the line through the Canadian base at Le Havre. Thence I went through Festubert to Givenchy where the old 1st Battalion went into battle with 919 men and six hours later over 600 had made the great sacrifice. Minor casualties left us only 137 men able to answer roll call and several of these had to go to the hospital on account of wounds received here. The first week of July we went to Ploegstreet which we called "home" for a long time. We called Ploegstreet "home" because it was so peaceful. (The Germans dared not shell us as we were so close to their trenches that they were afraid of hitting their own men.) The shell craters through which our trenches ran were only thirteen yards from the trenches of the enemy, and we could hear the Saxons who opposed us singing songs in English which they all seemed to speak fluently. One night I was on patrol when our party passed German patrol not five yards distant. Neither side dared fire for fear of starting the machine gun fire. One of the Saxons called out, "Hello, Canuck, how's Quebec, Winnipeg and Vancouver?" Evidently he had been in Quebec as he spoke of the St. Regis Hotel. At Ploegstreet the British had started a "sap" forty-eight feet deep where a tunnel, with twenty-five galleries running off from it, undermined the town. It took two years to build and was planted with one hundred thousand tons of high explosive dynamite. When it was exploded it blew up the entire town and also blew 61,000 Huns "Hell, west and crooked." This was the only way to take the position as the elaborate trench system of the Germans was practically impregnable. It was at Ploegstreet that the Huns "got our goat" by showing the wearing apparel of Belgian girls on the points of their bayonets.