The Cordova daily times., 1916-07-12
DO NUT FL|NCH
 ON LINE

lPress.) - These young Canadians fin khaki, playing baseball in Belgian pasture, could tell you what the shell fire at Verdun was like. They had been under 1t - the worst that has been known on the British front. Around them was the utter quiet of the countryside; in the distance the guns were still growing around Sor- rel Hill, Sanctuary Wood and Hooge, the scene of the Canadians greatest battle in France.
 Mud-stained, blood-stained, they had come away from the bloody piles of dirt which had been their trenches and after a long sleep they had won dered why they were alive and started to play baseball to pass the time until they should go into the trenches agin. They had been in the thick of it from 8:30 a. m. till 1:30 p. m. on June 2, right in the apex of the Ypres salient, that bend in the line which had stuck out as invitingly to the Germans as the Verdun salient for more than a year.
 The Germans could arrange their guns in a fan shape around it as they could at Verdun, and they did. When their guns began to speak the British guns spoke back; and even the old inhabitants of the Ypres salient agree that it was the worst ever Nobody on the spot ever supposed that there were so many guns in either the Ger man or British army.
 But the officer inside the farm house, sitting at the farmers dining room table could tell all about it- his small part of it. He and his men had been In and out of the trenches on their shifts till they were quite used to the monotony of the trench life, and the daily wastage. The morning of June was very quiet. A general who was taken prisoner af- terward was making an inspection. An occasional crack of a bullet overhead, and an occasional shot in answer. At more warning than boiler explosion. They always do, British or French or German.
 Five point hines" (that new 5.9- inch German shelD, "whiz bangs" trench-mortar shells and silent Liz zies" Ga naval gun shell of high velo city which is not heard coming until it bursts).
 q knew what we were in for" said the officer.
 Anybody with any experience at the front would know. At any time either side wants to concentrate its artillery on a certain frontage of trench that llOiLd5C ID DOulu tO 6O uO"hy oAN the attacking side can rush it's infan- try in and take the debris. The diff ficulty is to hold 1t. This time the shells were coming from the front and both sides. According to the usual system they were laid on both the front and the support trenches with a curtain of fire between the two
 You know the kind of country it is," this quiet young officer from To ronto went on.
 Nature as well as the shells is against the soldier. If he digs a trench water fills it. Mostly he must depend upon sandbags-roofs and walls of sandbags. He cannot dig eel lars twenty feet under the earth and crawl into them when the "cloudburst of hell' descends as in hilly and mountainous country. So nobody ever has a good word to say about the Ypres salient except the peasants. The soil is rich.
 we had no orders to go," said the officer. We stuck"
 They could not fire back at those guns thousands of yards away with their rifles. No one was showing his head in the German trench opposite. If a man leaned over a section of the parapet remaining to fire he and it might be blown away by another shell. The only thing to do was for each man to find any kind of cover he could in a fresh shell hole if no parapet remained and wait. Messengers in such instances, be 1t the British or German side, have one chance of five in surviving if they try to go or come from the rear.
 Five hours of this. Then at 80 in the afternoon orders to retreat did arrive.
 u,bo+ ofFicar from, TnronfO gathered