d,
as if the roof beams of the sky had been burst in. You can just hear,
through the crash, the shriek of a third and fourth shell as they come
tearing down the vault of heaven--_crash--crash_. Clouds of dust are
floating over you. A swifter shriek and something breaks like a glass
bottle in front of the parapet, sending its fragments slithering low
overhead. It bursts like a rainstorm, sheet upon sheet, _smash, smash,
smash_, with one or two more of the heavier shells punctuating the
shower of the lighter ones. The lighter shell is shrapnel from field
guns, sent, I dare say, to keep you in the trench while the heavier
shell pounds you there. A couple of salvos from each, perhaps twenty or
thirty shells in the minute, and the shrieks cease. The dust drifts
down the hill. The sky clears. The sun looks in. Five minutes later down
comes exactly such another shower.

That is the beginning. As the evening wears on, the salvos become more
frequent. All through the night they go on. The next morning the
intervals are becoming even less. Occasionally the hurricane reaches
such an intensity that there seems no interval at all. There is an
easing in the afternoon--which may indicate that the worst is over, or
merely that the guns are being cleaned, or the gunners having their tea.
Towards dusk it swells in a wave heavier than any that has yet come. All
through the second night the inferno lasts. In the grey dawn of the
second day it increases in a manner almost unbelievable--the dust of it
covers everything; it is quite impossible to see. The earth shakes and
quivers with the pounding.

It is just then that the lighter guns join in with the roll as of a
kettledrum--_Trommelfeuer_. The enemy is throwing out his infantry, and
his shrapnel is showering on to our lines in order to keep down the
heads of our men to the last moment. Suddenly the whole noise eases. The
enemy is casting his shrapnel and big shell farther back.

The chances are that most men in those racked lines do not know whether
the enemy ever delivers the attack or not. Our artillery breaks the head
of it before it crosses No Man's Land. A few figures on the skyline,
hopping from crater to crater, indicate what is left of it. As soon as
they find rifle fire and machine-guns on them the remnant give it up as
hopeless. They thought our men would have run--and they found them still
at their post; that is all.

And what of the men who have been out there under that h