came a sudden series of swishing
rushes and sharp vicious cracks overhead, and ripping thuds of shrapnel
across and across the trench. The burst of fire from the light guns
was excellently timed. Their high velocity and flat trajectory landed
the shells on their mark without any of the whistling rush of approach
that marked the bigger shells and gave time to duck into any available
cover. The one gust of light shells caught a full dozen men--as many
as the half-hour's work of the big guns.

Then the heavies opened again as accurately as before and twice as
fast. The trench began to yawn in wide holes, and its sides to crumble
and collapse. No. 2 Platoon occupied a portion of the trench that ran
out in a blunted angle, and it caught the worst of the fire. One shell
falling just short of the front parapet dug a yawning hole and drove in
the forward wall of the trench in a tumbled slide of mud and earth. A
dug-out and the two men occupying it were completely buried, and the
young officer scurried and pushed along to the place shouting for
spades. A party fell to work with frantic haste; but all their energy
was wasted. The occupants of the buried dug-out were dead when at last
the spades found them . . . and broken finger-nails and bleeding
finger-tips told a grisly tale of the last desperate struggle for
escape and for the breath of life. The officer covered the one
convulsed face and starting eyes with his handkerchief, and a private
placed a muddy cap over the other.

'Get back to your places and get down,' said the officer quietly, and
the men crawled back and crouched low again. For a full hour the line
lay under the flail of the big shells that roared and shrieked overhead
and thundered crashing along the trenches. For a full hour the men
barely moved, except to shift along from a spot where the shaken and
crumbling parapet gave insufficient cover from the hailing shrapnel
that poured down at intervals, and from the bullets that swept in and
smacked venomously into the back of the trench through the shell-rifts
in the parapet.

A senior officer made his way slowly along the sodden and quaking
trench. He halted beside the young officer and spoke to him a few
minutes, asking what the casualties were and hoping vaguely 'they would
ease off presently.'

'Can't our own guns do anything?' asked the youngster; 'or won't they
let us get out and have a go at them?'

The senior nodded towards the bare stret