the southward as if someone had hit an iron ship's tank with
a big drumstick. It was our preparatory bombardment which had begun.

A light showed dimly from one or two crevices in our trenches. We peeped
into one. It was very small, and someone was busy in there. The
bombardment was not half a minute old, but it was now continuous along
the whole horizon behind us. The noise was that of a large orchestra of
street boys each heartily banging his kerosene-tin drum. Our shells
streamed overhead with an almost continuous swish.

I do not know why, but some curious sense made one keep low in ducking
round to a bay of the front trench. The enemy's reply was not due for
some minutes yet. There was a sudden lurid red glare with a heavy crash
over the parapet to our right--perhaps 150 yards away. "That's not one
of their 5.9's, surely?" exclaims a friend.

"One of our trench mortars, I think," says another. As we sit in the
narrow trench, with our knees tucked up to our chins, there is no doubt
whatever of the advent of a new sheaf of missiles through the air above
our heads. We can hear the swish of our own shells, perhaps 100 feet up,
and the occasional rustle of some missile passing overhead a good deal
higher than that. One knows that this must be one of our howitzer shells
making his slow path, perhaps 200 or 300 feet above us, on his way to
fall on some German communication trench, and blow it in. I do not know,
but I rather suspect his duty is so to jumble up the walls and banks of
that trench as to prevent German supports from reaching their front line
without clambering into the open fields where our shrapnel is falling
like hail.

But under those two streams of overhead traffic is a third quite easily
distinguishable. It comes with short, descending screams--sheafs of them
together.

At the end of each there is a momentary glare over the sandbags, and the
bang as of an exploding rocket.

That is German shrapnel, bursting in the air and projecting its pellets
in a cone like a shot-gun. A little to the south of us there is a much
more formidable crash, always recurring several times in the minute. We
always know when that crash is coming by a certain fierce orange glare
which lights up the tops of our sandbags immediately before we hear the
sound. Three or four times the crash and the glare came together, and a
big cloud of stuffy-smelling white smoke drifted low overhead, and bits
of mud and earth cascaded down up