"But you're not a Johnny Canuck; you talk like a Englishman."
"That may be; I was born in England. But I am a Canadian. I've been out there for seventeen years," the other returned a little proudly.
"Hindeed! I was in Canada only three years. W'ere'd you come from in old England?"
"Faversham, Kent."
"Faversham! Well, I'm blowed! That's my 'ome! What the 'ell's yer name?"
"Reggie Roberts."
"W'y, blime me, I'm your brother Bill!" Affectionate greeting followed, then explanations: The elder brother had gone out to Alberta seventeen years before while the younger was still at school. Correspondence had stopped, as it so often does with men. Fourteen years later the other boy went out to Ontario. When the war broke out, they both enlisted, but in different regiments, and they meet after seventeen years' separation in the dark entrance to my dugout.
On the front of our division, an order came through telling us that information was reaching the enemy that should not reach him. For this reason all units were ordered to keep a sharp lookout for spies since we feared that some English-speaking Germans were visiting our lines.
In our battalion at that time was a very good and careful officer, Lieutenant Weston. Rather strangely, one of the men of his platoon was a Corporal Easton. Shortly after the above order had come forth, Lieutenant Weston was sent out on a reconnoitering expedition by night into No Man's Land. He took as his companion, Corporal Easton. Over the parapet they crept between flares, and proceeded to crawl cautiously about among the barbed wire entanglements, shellholes, and ghosts of bygone sins and German enemies. At each flare sent up by us or the enemy, splitting the thick darkness like a flash of lightning, they pushed their faces into the mud and lay perfectly still, in order to avoid becoming the target of a German sniper, or even possibly of some over-nervous Tommy. If there is any place in this war where Napoleon's dictum that "a soldier travels on his stomach" is lived up to in a literal and superlative degree, it is in No Man's Land by night.
Their reconnaissance had lasted some two hours when they started to return to what they thought was their own battalion front. But, as sometimes happens, they had lost their bearings. While they were correct as to the direction toward the Canadian lines in general, they were really crawling to the firing line of one of the brigades to our right. Suddenly Weston, who was leading, found his chest pressing against the sharp point of a bayonet. He heard a voice hissing: