sleep. Instead I went up about 6 o'clock through Pec
village to an O.P. on a hillside beyond, to see what could be seen. But
all the Front was hidden in a thick mist, made thicker by the smoke,
shot through with innumerable momentary flashes. All round us thousands
of guns were going off, filling the air with a deafening and continuous
roar. A telephonist was with me who had been through a good deal of the
Somme fighting, and had found the Italian Front, in times of lull, a
little uneventful. But this morning he was full of appreciation. "This
is something like it, isn't it, Sir?" he said. Being able to see
nothing, I went back to bed for some hours and spent the afternoon at a
Battery O.P., which had been specially arranged for this offensive, in
an Italian reserve trench just off the Pec-Merna road.

* * * * *

The bombardment continued through the 19th and 20th and 21st of August,
now with guns firing independently, now with salvos or rounds of Battery
fire, now with individual guns being ranged afresh from some O.P., with
hardly an hour's interval of silence. How little the individual soldier
knows of what is happening at these times! Conflicting rumours of
varying credibility came in to us during those three days, rumours of
big advances both to the north and to the south. But on our own sector
we knew that no permanent advance had been made, for we were still
firing a good deal on old "Zone 15," one of our first day's targets, and
on that damned Hill 464, the most important of the first objectives of
the Infantry.

Before this offensive began I had slept in a hut above ground, but the
Major had now insisted that I should sleep in a small dug-out half-way
up a steep bank, at the bottom of which our Mess Hut stood in an orchard
stretching down to the river bank. The Austrians shelled us
intermittently, but without doing any damage. In the small hours of the
21st I was dozing in my dug-out, where I had been reading Lowes
Dickinson's _Choice Before Us_, a congenial book at such a time, with
nine-tenths of which I was in complete agreement. I then heard a series
of Austrian "4.2's" come sailing over my dug-out and burst just at the
foot of the bank. They made miserable bursts in the soft earth, so small
as to make me suspect gas shells for a moment, but this suspicion did
not worry me, for no one was sleeping at the bottom and gas cannot run
uphill. Next morning I found a shell hole fi