Dinky is my mascot. I'll tell you about
him later.

On top of that another bit of luck came along, though it didn't
seem like it at the moment. It was the custom for a ration party to
go out each night and get up the grub. This party had to go over
the duck walk and was under fire both going and coming. One of the
corporals who had been out on rations two nights in succession
began to "grouse."

Of course Sergeant Page spotted me and detailed me to the
"wangler's" duty. I "groused" too, like a good fellow, but had to
go.

"Garn," says Wellsie. "Wot's the diff if yer gets it 'ere or there.
If ye clicks, I'll draw yer fags from Blighty and say a prayer for
yer soul. On yer way."

Cheerful beggar, Wellsie. He was doing me a favor and didn't know
it.

I did the three miles along the duck walk with the ration party,
and there wasn't a shell came our way. Queer! Nor on the way back.
Queerer! When we were nearly back and were about five hundred yards
from the base of the Pimple, a dead silence fell on the German side
of the line. There wasn't a gun nor a mortar nor even a rifle in
action for a mile in either direction. There was, too, a kind of
sympathetic let-up on our side. There weren't any lights going up.
There was an electric tension in the very air. You could tell by
the feel that something big was going to happen.

I halted the ration party at the end of the duck walk and waited.
But not for long. Suddenly the "Very" lights went up from the
German side, literally in hundreds, illuminating the top of the
ridge and the sky behind with a thin greenish white flare. Then
came a deep rumble that shook the ground, and a dull boom. A spurt
of blood-red flame squirted up from the near side of the hill, and
a rolling column of gray smoke.

Then another rumble, and another, and then the whole side of
the ridge seemed to open up and move slowly skyward with a
world-wrecking, soul-paralyzing crash. A murky red glare lit up the
smoke screen, and against it a mass of tossed-up debris, and for an
instant I caught the black silhouette of a whole human body
spread-eagled and spinning like a pin-wheel.

Most of our party, even at the distance, were knocked down by the
gigantic impact of the explosion. A shower of earth and rock
chunks, some as big as a barrel, fell around us.

Then we heard a far-away cheering, and in the light of the flares
we saw a newly made hill and our men swarming up it to the crater.
Two mines had