Organisations > Roll of honour of Caxton House Printing Office, Dundee

William S. Milne
to do his duty quietly and unconcernedly, " thinking-
nothing about it," as William Milne will tell you.
When off telephone duty our signallers were kept
busy laying and repairing the wires leading to the
various batteries and observation posts. These wires,
of course, could only be laid on the bare ground, except
at the crossing of a road, where they were put up on
poles or buried beneath the surface. Dangerous work
this was, and, as the days went by, not a few of the
signallers were either killed or w^ounded. " We soon
got over our first nervousness, however," says William,
" although the shells were exploding all around us. A
man knows there is no use looking for a safe place ; if
he selects a certain spot, that may be the very point
where the next shell is to burst. I once had a provi-
dential escape myself at this repair work. I climbed a
certain tree to fix up a wire, went on further and
finished the job, turned to walk back, and found that
the tree had — disappeared ! Telling the incident after-
wards to the sergeant, he coolly replied, ' Do you know
yon house at the corner of Angers ? — well, it's not there
now!'"
The observation post work, however, is the most
dangerous of all, as the man engaged in it is in close
proximity to the enemy lines, and he does not even have
the shelter which the trenches give to the men in the
front line of battle. William can tell you of his experi-
ences in the little burrow screened with bushes on the
brow of a hill overlooking the German army. He made
his way there, with one comrade, at the dead of night,
and the two of them carried as much bully beef,
biscuits, bread, tea, and sugar as would suffice them till
the shades of night would again come down upon the
scene. " It is a strange sensation," he says, " to look
out upon the battlefield and to find that nothing
whatever is moving, no human creature is visible to the
eye." The watchers in the burrow, however, must
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