e rising ground
opposite. Over towards the left rose the remains of Gommecourt Wood.
Half its trees had gone since the last time that I had seen it, and
the few that remained stood, looking like so many masts in a harbour,
gaunt and charred by our petrol shells.

The men in the left fire-bay seemed quite comfortable. But, standing
and looking down the trench, it suddenly dawned upon me that I was
gazing right into a line of chalky German trenches, and consequently
that the enemy in those trenches could look straight into this trench.
I left instructions with the corporal in charge of that section to
build up a barricade in the gap before daybreak. As I went along the
rest of our frontage, Sergeant S----l doled out the rum.

I retired to my "headquarters," but not so Sergeant S----l, who seemed
not to bother a bit about the increasing light and the bullets which
came phitting into the ground in rather an unpleasant quantity. I was
glad when I had finally got him down into the trench. W----k had also
told him to get in, for he remarked--

"Captain W----k, 'e says to me, 'Get into the trench, S----l, you
b---- fool!' so I've got in."

He was just in time. A prelude of shrapnel screamed along, bursting
overhead, and there followed an hour's nerve-racking bombardment.

CHAPTER III

ATTACK

Dawn was breaking. The morning was cool after a chill night--a night
of waiting in blown-down trenches with not an inch to move to right or
left, of listening to the enemy's shells as they left the guns and
came tearing and shrieking towards you, knowing all the time that they
were aimed for your particular bit of trench and would land in it or
by it, of awaiting that sudden, ominous silence, and then the
crash--perhaps death.

I, for my part, had spent most of the night sitting on a petrol tin,
wedged between the two sides of the trench and two human beings--my
sergeant on the left and a corporal on the right. Like others, I had
slept for part of the time despite the noise and danger, awakened now
and then by the shattering crash of a shell or the hopeless cry for
stretcher-bearers.

But morning was coming at last, and the bombardment had ceased. The
wind blew east, and a few fleecy clouds raced along the blue sky
overhead. The sun was infusing more warmth into the air. There was the
freshness and splendour of a summer morning over everything. In fact,
as one man said, it felt more as if we were going to start off for