``That’s the time to be out,’’ said the Sergeant. ``Ten o’clock on a summer’s night, and the night full of noises, not many of them, but what there is, strange, and coming from a great way off, through the quiet, with nothing to stop them.  Dogs barking, owls hooting, an old cart; and then just once a sound that you couldn’t account for at all, not anyhow.  I’ve heard sounds on nights like that that nobody ’ud think you’d heard, nothing like the flute that young Booker had, nothing like anything on earth.’’

``I know,’’ said the Private.

``I never told any one before, because they wouldn’t believe you.  But it doesn’t matter now.  There’d be a light in the window to guide me when I got home.  I’d walk up through the flowers of our garden.  We had a lovely garden.  Wonderful white and strange the flowers looked of a nighttime.’’

``You bring it all back wonderful,’’ said the Private.

``It’s a great thing to have lived,’’ said the Sergeant.

``Yes, Sergeant,’’ said the other, ``I wouldn’t have missed it, not for anything.’’

For five days the barrage had rained down behind them:  they were utterly cut off and had no hope of rescue:  their food was done, and they did not know where they were.

Shells

When the aëroplanes are home and the sunset has flared away, and it is cold, and night comes down over France, you notice the guns more than you do by day, or else they are actually more active then, I do not know which it is.

It is then as though a herd of giants, things of enormous height, came out from lairs in the earth and began to play with the hills.  It is as though they picked up the tops of the hills in their hands and then let them drop rather slowly.  It is exactly like hills falling.  You see the flashes all along the sky, and then that lumping thump as though the top of the hill had been let drop, not all in one piece, but crumbled a little as it would drop from your hands if you were three hundred feet high and were fooling about in the night, spoiling what it had taken so long to make.  That is heavy stuff bursting, a little way off.

If you are anywhere near a shell that is bursting, you can hear in it a curious metallic ring.  That applies to the shells of either side, provided that you are near enough, though usually of course it is the hostile shell and not your own that you are nearest to, and so one distinguishes them.  It is curious, after such a colossal event as this explosion must be in the life of a bar of steel, that anything should remain at all of the old bell-like voice of the metal, but it appears to, if you listen attentively; it is perhaps its last remonstrance before leaving its shape and going back to rust in the earth again for ages.