to see nothing.  The bombardment continued with great fury for several hours, with guns of all calibres, but fortunately mostly small, with shrapnel, high explosive, and gas, chiefly lacrimatory, but mixed with a certain quantity of lethal.  Luckily we had pretty good cover, mainly caverne blasted in the rock.  The Command Post itself was proof against anything less than a direct hit from a pretty heavy shell.  It was also supposed to be gas proof, but was not.  I collected about half a dozen men in it who had nowhere else to go, including two A.S.C. lorry drivers.

Early on, a young Bombardier was hit rather badly in the leg just outside.  We brought him into the Command Post, bandaged his wound and laid him on the camp bed, on which I had been hoping to get some sleep, and there left him till the shelling should abate and it should be reasonably safe to carry him to the dressing-station a quarter of a mile away.  He lay there, I remember, looking like a little tired cherub, and another Bombardier sat beside him and tried to persuade him to go to sleep.  They were very great friends, those two boys, both signallers, and inseparable both on and off duty.  The one who was not wounded went out that same morning and spent hours repairing telephone lines under very heavy fire, for which act he won the Military Medal.  The other, months later, when his wound was healed and he had returned to the Battery, also won the Military Medal for gallantry on the Piave.

The conduct of the two lorry drivers afforded a strong contrast in psychology.  One, a man of middle age, was superbly cheerful.  “They can’t keep this up much longer,” he said several times with a placid smile, “they haven’t the stuff to do it.”  The other, though younger, was a bunch of visible nerves.  A shell exploded just behind the Command Post and violently shook the whole structure and a storm of stones hit the log framework.  He collapsed on the floor, and was convinced for a couple of minutes that he had been hit, and for some time after that he was suffering from shell shock.

Such illusions come easily at such times.  A gas shell made a direct hit on one of our smaller dug-outs.  A Sergeant inside was badly gassed.  They put him for the moment in a gas-proof shelter, higher up the hill, and several hours later I saw him being carried away on a stretcher, apparently lifeless.  But he finally pulled through.  A gunner who was with him in the dug-out came running into the Command Post crying out that he also was gassed.  I made him lie flat on the floor, and told him to keep as quiet as he could.  And then I watched his breathing.  It was clear after a minute or two that, if he had had a breath of gas at all, it was only of the slightest.  But, when I told him this, he was very unwilling to believe me.  Another man was hit just outside, and lay on the ground screaming like an animal in pain.  Him, too, we carried into the Command Post, and, later, on a stretcher to the dressing station.