atter of fact it was the colonel who answered, and supplied me with
the "five seconds to go" information; so there was no doubt about the
correctness of the time-taking on this occasion, and after I had gone
out and roused an officer of each battery, and made him check his
watch, I turned in again and sought sleep.

VIII. TRONES WOOD AGAIN

For three hours after zero hour our guns spat fire, fining down from
four rounds a gun a minute to the slow rate of one round each minute.
The enemy artillery barked back furiously for the first two hours, but
got very few shells into our valley; and after a time we paid little
heed to the 5.9's and 4.2's that dropped persistently on the top of the
western slope. An 8-inch that had landed in the valley about midnight
had wrought frightful execution, however. Another brigade lay next to
us; in fact one of their batteries had occupied a position intended for
our C Battery. The shell fell with a blinding crash among their horses,
which they had kept near the guns in readiness for the morning; and for
half an hour the darkness was pierced by the cries and groans of
wounded men, and the sound of revolvers putting horses out of their
pain. Four drivers had been killed and twenty-nine horses knocked out.
"A lucky escape for us," was the grim, not unsympathetic comment of C
Battery.

All through the morning the messages telephoned to me indicated that
the fighting up forward had been hard and relentless. Our infantry had
advanced, but twice before eleven o'clock I had to dash out with S.O.S.
calls; and at intervals I turned each battery on to enemy points for
which special artillery treatment was demanded.

The colonel ordered Wilde and myself to join the forward Headquarters
party after lunch. We found them in a small square hut, built at the
foot of a range of hills that rose almost sheer 200 feet up, and curled
round north-east to Catterpillar Valley in which our batteries had
spent a bitter punishing time during the third week of July 1916. The
hut contained four wire beds and a five-foot shaft in one corner, where
a solitary telephonist crouched uncomfortably at his task. The hut was
so cramped for space that one had to shift the table--a map-board laid
upon a couple of boxes--in order to move round it.

The winding road outside presented a moving war panorama that
afternoon. Two Infantry brigades and their staffs, and some of the
battalion commanders, had huts under the hi