back. They say the devil takes care of his own. Yeah, well, that's the way it reads. There was about 250 in our unit. That was pretty near all Islanders. But when we got to England the smaller ones was siphoned out. You had to weigh so much, you see, before they would leave you there. The smaller ones would go with the Signallers or somewhere else. Chances are you'd not see them anymore. I seen the Battle of the Somme in a field as big as this and there's supposed to be 10 acres in this. All covered with dead.... They were all in kilts. But they couldn't get to bury them. Too much under observation. That was late in the fall; oh, what'd it be? Last of October, first of November. And there, until they're into snow, they have what they call the wet season, you see. It goes, perhaps, a couple of months. Raining every second day. Raining and freezing. Well, I bet you there was well over a thousand there. It's a hell of a game you know. And for what? Oh, you'd get used to it. Of course, you got to always be on the alert or something could happen. You got to bear in mind you're on a battlefield. But you get shell hardened to the bugger. Now, I'll tell you of Bethune in France. It puts me very much in mind of Winnipeg. A big city and wide streets. I seen it when there wasn't a brick knocked out of it. It was a beautiful sight. Well, I seen it when the whole damn thing was just a mass of broken iron and broken dead bodies. So there's the story. It's war. Do you see? But this night there was three of us sleeping in a basement...in Bethune. France was flattened to the floor. And Bethune was flattened to the floor.... We had a piece of a tent over us down in this basement and I was between the other two fellas. We heard a "johnny" coming and we could tell the damn thing was pretty handy. She exploded and the fella to my left was killed. The fella to my right, his arm was taken off. And I never got a damn scratch. But, the first thing, I felt the warm blood running down under me. So I cried out. The fella to my left, he trembled for a few seconds and then relaxed. I knew when he was relaxed he was dead.... The other fella was raising hell with the pain. I got out from under the oil cover and I remembered seeing a light in an old basement when we were going down there... so I crawled over and I shouted out, "Is anybody in?" I got an answer right away. Two Canadians. A lieutenant and a captain.... Well then, the two of them came up and they got this fella up. His arm was gone. He was after losing a lot of blood you 34 BELFAST PEOPLE