The Austrians did not shell much till the evening, when they nearly hit our Mess and shell-shocked a man of another Battery in the road close by.  But the Italian bombardment all day was very heavy, and our guns and theirs were to go on firing all night.  Just before midnight I relieved the Major in the Command Post, and he and the rest of the officers went to bed.  So I sat there wakefully among the acacias, awaiting any sudden orders from the Group to switch or lift to new targets, or to vary the rate of fire.  Every now and then I took a walk round the Battery to see that all was working correctly, and every hour the N.C.O.’s in charge of each gun brought in their fired tubes to the Command Post and reported how many rounds had been fired in the preceding hour and how many tubes misfired.

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It was a clear, starlight night, up above the multitudinous flashes of British and Italian guns.  At close quarters these flashes were blindingly bright, and flung up showers of red sparks.  In the intervals of a few seconds between flashes, if one stood with one’s eyes fixed on the guns, the stars seemed blotted out in an utterly black darkness.  A long bombardment is one of the most boring things in the world by reason of its intense monotony, and because in a queer half-unconscious way it begins, after many hours, very slightly to fray the nerves.  Listening and watching in the small hours, and from time to time directing, I found myself able, with almost discreditable elastic-mindedness, to call up at will any of the aspects of modern war,—­its utter and inherent wickedness, its artistic and scientific majesty, its occasional moral justification against the oppressor, its ultimate blank insanity.  But I would not have liked to be an Austrian yesterday or this morning.  The Italian Infantry attacked on our sector at 5.30 a.m.  There was a tremendous crescendo of gunfire at this time.  The Major relieved me in the Command Post at 5 o’clock, and urged me to go to bed, but I did not feel inclined to sleep.  Instead I went up about 6 o’clock through Pec village to an O.P. on a hillside beyond, to see what could be seen.  But all the Front was hidden in a thick mist, made thicker by the smoke, shot through with innumerable momentary flashes.  All round us thousands of guns were going off, filling the air with a deafening and continuous roar.  A telephonist was with me who had been through a good deal of the Somme fighting, and had found the Italian Front, in times of lull, a little uneventful.  But this morning he was full of appreciation.  “This is something like it, isn’t it, Sir?” he said.  Being able to see nothing, I went back to bed for some hours and spent the afternoon at a Battery O.P., which had been specially arranged for this offensive, in an Italian reserve trench just off the Pec-Merna road.

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