WHEN officers arrive in England they are given the option of going to France as lieutenants or going back home. That is the reason you see so many bold footed officers holding down staff jobs in England and Canada. Colonel Hilliam who was now our commanding officer, says that the 25th battalion made his name; but the 25th boys are equally positive that he made the battalion. It was truly wonderful the confidence we placed in him and he never disappointed us. He was very strong on discipline, and when all is said and done that is most essential in the army. Without it a battalion simply. becomes a mob. During the winter we were on the Kimmell front. It was a bad year in the trenches, for the rain and mud were something awful. The mud was waist deep and of such a nature that once a fellow got stuck it took another chap to get him out. For about two months they were trenches in name only; they were caved right in and the boys that were doing front line work would go in at 8 o'clock one night and would not be relieved until 8 o'clock the next night—twenty-four hours without any hot food. I must say that we found the hot rum ration that winter to be a most desirable thing.

Our colonel was a regular fire eater, and wanted to be at it all the time. He organized a raiding party in charge of Capt. Tupper along with Brooks, Cameron and Roberts. All four of them proved to be great fighters. They were the pick of the battalion.

And now enters that great hero—Toby Jones— "the Man who came back!" He was machine gun officer, and the Colonel also put him in charge of a wire cutting party, and thus he was carrying the responsibility of both jobs. He would be around his guns all day and at night he would be scouting all over "No Man's land" and in December, 1915 it was no joke crawling around in the mud. He never got any rest. He would not eat, and the day of the raid Fritz had straffed us quite a lot. I was in trench S. P. 12 along with Toby when a message came to tell us that a shell had knocked in one of the dugouts and had killed one of our N. C. O's, Corporal Ferguson, a chap who was well liked by everybody. A road named the "V. C. Road" separated us from J 4. The Germans were shelling this road pretty bad; but as soon as Toby got the message he did not hesitate one minute but went across to J 4. He seemed to have had a charmed life. Shells were bursting all around him but he never got a scratch. That night Corporal Ingraham and the McNeil brothers, the three biggest dare devils that were in our battalion left our dugout on a wire cutting expedition. Imagine, three or four men lying on their backs in mud and water cutting at Fritz's wire just a few feet away from his trench! Jones would go around his gun teams to make sure that everything was all right and then he would visit his wire cutting party.

Night after night Toby would be engaged in this dangerous and telling work. It proved too much for flesh and blood, and one night just as a visit was planned he broke right down and was carried to our lines on a stretcher. Well, Toby got the blame for the failure of that evening and left our battalion; but as the old adage puts it "You can't keep a good man down" and Toby Jones enlisted again as a private in the 42nd Battalion—won back his commission with the D. C. M. and a bar. Every man in the "Fighting Twenty-Fifth" lifts his hat to Toby Jones—the greatest hero of them all!

We carried out several raids the next few weeks on the Kimmil front, and, as a matter of fact, it is no exaggeration to say that trench-raiding which has since been carried out so extensively was really initiated by the "Fighting Twenty-Fifth.' Before proceeding further, let me describe a trench. They are all transversed, because if a shell or bomb should burst in one part of the trench the transverse prevents the spread of the shrapnel. A communication trench is usually to connect the trenches together, and sometimes these trenches are a mile long reaching from the front line to some part be hind the line where it is comparatively safe to walk around. They are very deep and zig-zag in shape so that they cannot be enfiladed.

On the Belgian front we could not have deep dugouts for the soil was so soft. To dig down a few feet was to strike water. At first we only had sand bags shelters, then we had the corrugated iron ones which were shrapnel and bomb proof.