If we had come along half a minute later we should have had a better view, and perhaps now we should have been on a bed in a hospital worrying how we were going to pay the rent, or in the place where, hopefully, we shall have no worries at all.  Between walls of earth the report was deadened to our ears in the same way as a revolver report in an adjoining room; and not much earth had gone down the backs of our necks from the concussion.

Looking over the parapet, we saw a cloud of thick, black smoke; and we heard the outcry of a man who had been hit.  That was all.  The shell might have struck nearer without our having seen or heard any more.  Shut in by the gallery walls, one knows as little of what happens in an adjoining cave as a clam buried in the sand knows of what is happening to a neighbour clam.  A young soldier came half-stumbling into the nearest dug-out.  He was shaking his head and batting his ears as if he had sand in them.  Evidently he was returning to his home cave from a call on a neighbour which had brought him close to the burst.

“That must have been about six or seven-inch,” I said to the officer, trying to be moderate and casual in my estimate, which is the correct form on such occasions.  My actual impression was forty-inch.

“Nine-inch, h.e.,” replied the expert.

This was gratifying.  It was the first time that I had been so near to a nine-inch-shell explosion.  Its “eat ’em-alive” frightfulness was depressing.  But the experience was worth having.  You want all the experiences there are—­but only “close.”  A delightful word that word close, at the front!

The Germans were generous that afternoon.  Another scream
seemed aimed at my head.  L------ disagreed with me; he said that it
was aimed at his.  We did not argue the matter to the point of a
personal quarrel, for it might have got both our heads.  It burst back of
the trench about as far away as the other shell.  After all, a trench is a
pretty narrow ribbon, even on a gunner’s large scale map, to hit.  It is
wonderful how, firing at such long range, he is able to hit a trench at
all.

This was all of the nine-inch variety for the time being.  We got some fours and fives as we walked along.  Three bursting as near together as the ticks of a clock made almost no smoke, as they brought some tree limbs down and tore away a section of a trunk.  Then the thunderstorm moved on to another part of the line.  Only, unlike the thunderstorms of nature, this, which is man-made and controlled as a fireman controls the nozzle of his hose, may sweep back again and yet again over its path.  All depends upon the decision of a German artillery officer, just as whether or not a flower-bed shall get another sprinkle depends upon the will of the gardener.