. The order for no talk seemed silly as we clattered along
the boards, making a noise like a four-horse team on a covered
bridge.

I immediately wondered whether we were near enough for the Boches
to hear. I wasn't in doubt long, for they began to send over the
"Berthas" in flocks. The "Bertha" is an uncommonly ugly breed of
nine-inch shell loaded with H.E. It comes sailing over with a
querulous "squeeeeeee", and explodes with an ear-splitting crash
and a burst of murky, dull-red flame.

If it hits you fair, you disappear. At a little distance you are
ripped to fragments, and a little farther off you get a case of
shell-shock. Just at the edge of the destructive area the wind of
the explosion whistles by your ears, and then sucks back more
slowly.

The Boches had the range of that duck walk, and we began to run.
Every now and then they would drop one near the walk, and from four
to ten casualties would go down. There was no stopping for the
wounded. They lay where they fell. We kept on the run, sometimes on
the duck walk, sometimes in the mud, for three miles. I had reached
the limit of my endurance when we came to a halt and rested for a
little while at the foot of a slight incline. This was the
"Pimple", so called on account of its rounded crest.

The Pimple forms a part of the well-known Vimy Ridge--is a
semi-detached extension of it--and lies between it and the Souchez
sector. After a rest here we got into the trenches skirting the
Pimple and soon came out on the Quarries. This was a bowl-like
depression formed by an old quarry. The place gave a natural
protection and all around the edge were dug-outs which had been
built by the French, running back into the hill, some of them more
than a hundred feet.

In the darkness we could see braziers glowing softly red at the
mouth of each burrow. There was a cheerful, mouth-watering smell of
cookery on the air, a garlicky smell, with now and then a whiff of
spicy wood smoke.

We were hungry and thirsty, as well as tired, and shed our packs at
the dug-outs assigned us and went at the grub and the char offered
us by the men we were relieving, the Northumberland Fusiliers.

The dug-outs here in the Quarries were the worst I saw in France.
They were reasonably dry and roomy, but they had no ventilation
except the tunnel entrance, and going back so far the air inside
became simply stifling in a very short time.

I took one inhale of the interior atmosphere and decided