mperfectly shuttered house.

At all events, something or other gave the Boches the tip, and we soon
knew they had got their attention on our village.

Each morning as we clustered round our little green table and had our
breakfast, we invariably had about half a dozen rounds of 18-pounders
crash around us with varying results, but one day, as we'd finished our
meal and all sat staring into the future, we suddenly caught the sound
of something on more corpulent lines arriving. That ponderous, slow
rotating whistle of a "Johnson" caught our well-trained ears; a pause!
then a reverberating, hollow-sounding "crumph!" We looked at each other.

"Heavies!" we all exclaimed.

"Look out! here comes another!" and sure enough there it was, that
gargling crescendo of a whistle followed by a mighty crash, considerably
nearer.

We soon decided that our best plan was to get out of the house, and stay
in the ditch twenty yards away until it was over.

A house is an unwholesome spot to be in when there's shelling about. Our
funk hole was all right for whizz-bangs and other fireworks of that
sort, but no use against these portmanteaux they were now sending along.

Well, to resume; they put thirteen heavies into that village in pretty
quick time. One old ruin was set on fire, and I felt the consequent
results would be worse than just losing the building; as all the men in
it had to rush outside and keep darting in and out through the flames
and smoke, trying to save their rifles and equipment.

After a bit we returned into the house--a trifle prematurely, I'm
afraid--as presently a pretty large line in explosive drainpipes landed
close outside, and, as we afterwards discovered, blew out a fair-sized
duck pond in the road. We were all inside, and I think nearly every one
said a sentence which gave me my first idea for a _Fragment from
France_. A sentence which must have been said countless times in this
war, _i.e._, "Where did that one go?"

We were all inside the cottage now, with intent, staring faces, looking
outside through the battered doorway. There was something in the whole
situation which struck me as so pathetically amusing, that when the
ardour of the Boches had calmed down a bit, I proceeded to make a pencil
sketch of the situation. When I got back to billets the next time I
determined to make a finished wash drawing of the scene, and send it to
some paper or other in England. In due course we got back to billets,
and