ever heard a shell before would have
"scrooched," as the small boys say, as instinctively as you draw back
when the through express tears past the station. It is the kind of
scream that makes you want to roll yourself into a package about the
size of a pea, while you feel as tall and large as a cathedral, judging
by the sensation that travels down your backbone.

Once I was being hoisted up a cliff in a basket, when the rope on the
creaking windlass above slipped a few inches. Well, it is like that, or
like taking a false step on the edge of a precipice. Is the clock about
to strike twelve or not? Not this time! The burst was thirty yards away,
along the path we had just traversed, and the sound was like the
burst of a shell and like nothing else in the world, just as the swirling,
boring, growing scream of a shell is like no other scream in the world.
A gigantic hammer-head sweeps through the air and breaks a steel
drum-head.

If we had come along half a minute later we should have had a better
view, and perhaps now we should have been on a bed in a hospital
worrying how we were going to pay the rent, or in the place where,
hopefully, we shall have no worries at all. Between walls of earth the
report was deadened to our ears in the same way as a revolver
report in an adjoining room; and not much earth had gone down the
backs of our necks from the concussion.

Looking over the parapet, we saw a cloud of thick, black smoke; and
we heard the outcry of a man who had been hit. That was all. The
shell might have struck nearer without our having seen or heard any
more. Shut in by the gallery walls, one knows as little of what
happens in an adjoining cave as a clam buried in the sand knows of
what is happening to a neighbour clam. A young soldier came half-
stumbling into the nearest dug-out. He was shaking his head and
batting his ears as if he had sand in them. Evidently he was returning
to his home cave from a call on a neighbour which had brought him
close to the burst.

"That must have been about six or seven-inch," I said to the officer,
trying to be moderate and casual in my estimate, which is the correct
form on such occasions. My actual impression was forty-inch.

"Nine-inch, h.e.," replied the expert.

This was gratifying. It was the first time that I had been so near to a
nine-inch-shell explosion. Its "eat 'em-alive" frightfulness was
depressing. But the experience was worth having. You want all the
experie