nry rose high in the air. One shell hit the
Artillery Group Headquarters of Major Borghese and I saw all his office
papers going up, a cloud of shreds, shining in the sun. I laughed and
said to myself, "There goes a lot of red tape!" I saw Borghese himself
later in the day limping along with a stick; a chunk of one of his
office walls had fallen on his foot.

The enemy meanwhile had begun to shell the lorry, methodically as their
idiotic habit was, with one shell every five minutes. It was too near us
to be pleasant, so the Major took out a party and hauled it out of their
view under cover of a bank. But this took some time. Leary stood by with
a stopwatch calling out the minutes. At the end of every fourth minute,
the party ran for cover. Then a few seconds later we heard the next
shell coming. The Major was hit on the hand once by a shell splinter
which drew blood, but nothing more serious than this happened.

About two o'clock a big bombardment worked up again, and the Volconiac
and Faiti became a sea of smoke and flame. This went on till dusk, we
firing hard all the time. More enemy planes came over, one even after
dark, a most unusual thing, flying very low indeed, under a heavy fire
of anti-aircraft Batteries and machine guns from the ground. Our planes
had been very scarce all day. They had nearly all gone north. For the
time being we had quite lost the command of the air in this sector.

The two British Batteries who were furthest forward had orders to move
back that night to reserve positions on San Michele. The Italians were
going to horse their guns, for it was said that the majority of the
tractors had gone north too. This move looked rather panicky, I thought.

Many red rockets went up in the early evening from Volconiac and Faiti.
The enemy were making another attack. Then a little later tricolour
rockets, red, white and green, went up. This was the signal that the
attack had been beaten off and that the situation was quiet again. The
firing died down about seven. We fed and put up for the night an Italian
officer, whose Battery used to be here, but had moved north yesterday.
He had just come back from a gas course at Palmanova. From a newspaper
which he had I saw that a strong offensive had begun on the afternoon of
the 23rd to the north of the Bainsizza Plateau. Either the attacks here
were only holding attacks, or the attack to the north was a feint and
the real thing was to be here. Anyhow, I thought