I joined the Navy as an apprentice seaman. I thought it would be great to try a new way of licking the Huns. I had sampled the army. Yes, I was at the Somme with the Canucks. Greatest bunch of fighters the world has ever seen!

I can say it, because I'm an American, but as soon as war was declared, my three cousins and I beat it for Canada and enlisted. We were all in the same regiment, the third to go across.

You've no idea until you get into the thick of a fight with shrapnel whistling past you and shells bursting a few feet away, how much depends on your leader. It's up to him to win or lose the ground you're holding for all you're worth. The men in charge of us were young and some of them pretty green at the war game—but say! there wasn't a bloody Hun alive that could scare them! Not by a long sight!

We sailed in August, about two thousand of us. We had a quiet trip across and, oh, Christmas! how we did long to get into the scrap! They landed us at a French port and we had just three days' training before we were ordered up.

You can't make much headway in three days to prepare you to meet the Boches, but we did manage to get in a little drilling and skirmishing. All the bayonet charging I learned was from a Jap in my company. He was a funny little cuss. Why he joined up I can't imagine. You'd think he would rather save his skin and stay at home, but he was all for fighting. He had been trained in Japan and had joined the Canadians at the last minute.

My cousins and I learned all we knew from him. He seemed glad to show us. He was a friendly little chap and some fighter! I remember seeing him alongside of me for a few seconds in a trench full of Germans ... and then not seeing him. What became of him I never knew. You don't, most of the time.

A long line of troop trains were awaiting us. Pullmans? I guess not!—freights. We piled in. We were all anxious to get to the front. We knew they were in desperate need of men and that we might get a chance to go over the top, green as we were.

It was night before they opened the doors and let us out. We seemed to be in a sort of meadow. It was black as a cave, except for the lights of the station. There was plenty of noise as two thousand men alighted, but there was another sound—a dull, thick booming ... cannons! It seemed thousands of miles away, but you never forgot it for an instant. It meant that we fellows who had been so recently in offices plugging away for so much a week were out there at last on the great battlefield of France!

We had reached the trenches. They weren't at all like I supposed they'd be. I expected them to be narrow, with room enough for one man only. Instead two and sometimes three could walk abreast. It seemed to me as though we marched a hundred miles that night. I was so tired I was ready to drop, and then all the mud I had ever read about seemed to be planted in that trench! Mud! We tramped through knee-deep slime—knee-deep, mind you—and we thought that was bad until we went in up to our waists.

It must have been raining pitchforks before we arrived, and as we scuffed along the best way we could it began again—a cold, driving rain straight down from the black sky, stinging our faces and running down our necks. After a while we halted for the night.

There were dugouts where you could set up your cook-stove if you were lucky enough to own one. All your food you carried on your back in cans, but you didn't have energy enough left to open them. You just dropped down under the shelter of a bunch of sandbags if you were lucky, or if you weren't, in a muddy patch of ground where you slept like a log.

Next day we were on our way—that long line of drenched men tramping toward the sound of the big guns. That's how you measured distance, by increasing volume. The rain had begun in earnest and it never let up for the three days we made our way to the trench just back of the Big Hill.

It seemed to be our destination, because we got orders to begin digging, and we went to work with pick and shovel. I forgot how tired I was in the excitement of being so near the Huns. You do out there. You don't worry about dying, that's one sure bet, nor about eating or sleeping; the one thing that gets you is when your best pals go west.

I had to stand watch that night. That meant two hours of pacing back and forth, fifteen feet, ready for the enemy's charge at any second. I couldn't believe that the fellows we were waiting for were so close up—there across that short patch of ground—but I realized it when a shell fell not five feet away from me and blew three of my pals to bits. By God! I knew it then!

I shall never forget it. I'd been listening to them talk in a little knot as I paced by, swapping smokes and trying to find a dry place to stand. One of them laughed. That was the last sound I heard before the crash of exploding shell. There wasn't one of them left.

We were four days waiting for the signal to charge. We were mad for it. It seemed as if the leaders could not hold us back another day. We wanted to get at those damned Huns who had killed our pals. We knew we could lick them, raw as we were. We had some full-blooded Indians from Ontario with us. They were the real thing in a fight. They did not know what fear meant. There just wasn't any such word in the language for them, and when they charged they forgot they were supposed to use rifles. They threw them away and drew their long knives—razor-sharp. That's how they went after the Huns—and butchered the swine good and proper.

On the fourth day the signal was passed along the trench for a charge. One hundred and fifty men were picked—every third man. I was lucky and was one of the number. Every man was keen to be first over the top. About nine of the Indians came along. None of my cousins made it, but the little Jap who had taught me bayoneting was beside me, grinning and fondling his rifle as a mother does her baby.

Our leaders sprang up on the sand bags and hurled us the order. How few of them came back from that charge on which they set out so fearlessly!

We climbed up. We heard our officers shouting to us and our comrades wishing us the best of luck, to give the Huns hell! We sprang forward and the Germans opened a rain of bullets from their machine guns full upon us and the men who followed. They swept our lines. Men reeled and fell to the left and right of me—just crumpled up like those little toys whose springs have snapped. Still we went on. We made the trench and I speared my first Boche. Got him, too! Brought back his iron cross as a trophy. The Germans were scampering to the next trench like rats caught in a trap. They sure do hate hand-to-hand fighting!

We held that trench six days. It was jumpy work. The Germans were driven back, but there was no telling when they would start with the hand-grenades. They didn't do that, but they did something worse—gas. It was pretty new to us then. We were fitted out with a sort of rubber mask that wasn't much good. We saw a fellow drop a way down the line. Then one of the brownish trench rats, a friendly little chap, who ate the scraps I shelled out to him, turned up his toes. We clapped on our masks, but the wind was with Fritz and the gas swept through our trench on the breeze.

It lasted about an hour and a half. I'd hate the job of being the first man ordered to take off his mask and test the air for the rest, but some one has to, and it often means lights out for him.

I had been slightly wounded—a sabre cut on my leg, but I managed to dress it myself. It was ten times better to be up, however rocky you felt, than lying around those damp trenches. I wondered where my cousins were. I worried about them. Somehow I wasn't afraid for myself, but I just wished it would soon be over and I could get home. You think about home an awful lot out there.

We were sent to some swamps next. There were cement trenches—German make—and they were considerably drier. We were pretty comfortable there except for an occasional shell blowing things to bits. I used to wonder how there was enough lead in the world to make all the shells the armies used. We always had plenty of ammunition. The Russians were the ones who got the raw deal. We passed a lot of them on our way out front. A regiment of them was holding a square. They were dull-eyed boys—hopeless looking. Do you blame them? One day they would be sent out with ammunition to burn. The next they wouldn't even be given a rifle. How did they protect themselves? Oh, rocks and stones, I suppose. But they were wiped out when they tried to charge empty-handed, that's sure.

The Germans raided us with hand grenades one night. We heard them coming and we fought like fiends, but they outnumbered us five to one. I went down with a shot in my side. The next thing I remembered was being aboard a transport bound for home. Nothing ever sounded so good to me as that word! I found my three cousins were aboard. One of them had lost his two legs, another his leg and his arm, and the youngest had his right arm blown off.

It didn't take me long to find out how lucky I was. All I needed to do was to look around at the other eighteen hundred wounded. They landed us at Halifax, on our way to Toronto. I was laid up for quite a while, and the funny thing was now that I was home again I kept planning ways to get back as soon as I could just to show those Huns who's who.

I used to lie in my clean white bed, looking out a long window onto the garden. It was calm and quiet. But I didn't seem to see it—what I saw were those blood-soaked trenches, with your pals gasping out their lives alongside of you and your leaders, falling even as they urged you to charge! It took me a while to get well and when I did I went back to the States. I had an idea. I would join the Navy. It would be a new way of meeting Fritz. I liked the thought of killing him wholesale on the sea.

I enlisted as an apprenticed seaman,—that was last March. I am in fine trim, except for a scar on my leg and a bullet hole in my side. I've finished training now and I'm ready to be shipped across. Gee, but I hope we'll get a fat submarine full of German officers—and that we'll drown them like the rats they are!

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