hell burst a few score yards in
front of me; another and another followed. One which had been discharged
at a higher elevation than the rest burst overhead, and I began to feel
extremely nervous. I dismounted and led my pony into the wood on the
right hand side. I had not penetrated ten yards into the wood when a
shell burst in front of me and in something like panic I dragged my
little steed across the road and sought a shelter in the wood on the
opposite side. Crash! came a shell in front of me as I entered, and this
time nearer than ever. Now it is one thing to be in imminent danger in
the midst of your comrades or even when you have the companionship of a
single friend, and it is another to find yourself surrounded by a
ring of fire when you are absolutely alone and have nobody to lend you
countenance. The memory of that time will always make me pitiful to
the man who runs away. For one instant I was on the edge of an absolute
surrender to physical fear. How I got a grip of myself I really do not
know. I was certainly most horribly afraid and my nerve was almost
gone, when I remembered that on a previous journey I had passed a great
outcrop of granite rock, which afforded a perfect shelter. I reflected
that it was just as dangerous to go back as to go on, and I estimated
that my refuge was only two or three hundred yards in front of me. With
this aim in mind, I mounted again and rode uphill as fast as my mount
could carry me. When I reached my shelter the shells were howling and
screaming and bursting everywhere, but I sat in perfect safety, and by
and by recovered my self-possession. I had been there perhaps an hour
and had begun to write an account of my morning's adventure when I
heard a wild voice pealing down the road and the stumbling clatter of a
horse's hoofs at a dangerous, breakneck speed, and the horseman passed
and in his passage, swift as it was, we recognised each other. I knew
the man quite well; he was an English doctor, and I felt as keen a pang
of pity as I have ever experienced in my life as I recognised in him
that condition of abject surrender to fear from which I had myself so
recently escaped, Heaven alone knows how! I had touched the line and had
somehow been saved from going over it; the man who went howling past me
had touched the line and crossed it. He was holding on to the front of
his saddle and his horse's reins were trailing loose and broken; his
face was livid and he was yelling with s