surrounded. Their success depends on the element of surprise and the quickness of their get-away when they have done their work. If they took too many prisoners they would be hampered in their return. If they left any of the enemy alive behind them, they would be fired on as they retired. So the order is “No quarter and kill swiftly.”     

       Now that the attack has started, I cease to be concerned for the Hun: all my thought is for our chaps. I knew so many of them. Silborrad, the scout officer of the nth Battalion is there; a frail appearing lad, with the look of a consumptive and the heart of a lion. It was he who with one sergeant held up sixty Huns at Avion, driving them back with bombs from traverse to traverse. Battling Brown is in charge of the company; he’s the champion raiding officer of our corps and, with the exception of the V. C., has won every decoration that a man can earn. Curious stories are told about him. It is said that in the return from one raid he had brought three prisoners within sight of our lines when suddenly, without rhyme or reason, he lined them up and shot them dead. The moment he had done so he fell to weeping. This particular raid had been put on to gain identifications of the enemy Division that was facing us. By killing his prisoners he had failed in the purpose for which the raid bad been planned. You cannot wring answer? from the dead. Having seen his men safely back into our trenches, he set out alone across No Man’s Land. What he did there or how he did it, he has never told to anyone; but by dawn he came padding back through our wire, driving three new prisoners in front of him. For every Hun he shoots he makes a notch in the handle of his revolver. He has used up the handles of three revolvers already. He’s tall and slim as a girl, with nice eyes and a wistful sort of mouth. When he came to the war he was barely eighteen; today he’s scarcely twenty-one. War hasn’t aged him; he thrives on it and looks, if anything, more boyish. It’s only in a fight that his face loses its brooding expression of thwarted tenderness. Of a sudden it becomes hard and stern—almost Satanic. There never was such a man for clutching at glory.     

       And then there’s big Dick Dirk. When he first joined our Brigade, he got the reputation for being yellow because he talked so freely about being afraid. He has no right to be in the raid. It isn’t his job; he’s supposed to be deep underground in the Battalion Headquarters’       

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