Cheerful beggar, Wellsie. He was doing me a favor and didn't know
it.

I did the three miles along the duck walk with the ration party,
and there wasn't a shell came our way. Queer! Nor on the way back.
Queerer! When we were nearly back and were about five hundred yards
from the base of the Pimple, a dead silence fell on the German side
of the line. There wasn't a gun nor a mortar nor even a rifle in
action for a mile in either direction. There was, too, a kind of
sympathetic let-up on our side. There weren't any lights going up.
There was an electric tension in the very air. You could tell by
the feel that something big was going to happen.

I halted the ration party at the end of the duck walk and waited.
But not for long. Suddenly the "Very" lights went up from the
German side, literally in hundreds, illuminating the top of the
ridge and the sky behind with a thin greenish white flare. Then
came a deep rumble that shook the ground, and a dull boom. A spurt
of blood-red flame squirted up from the near side of the hill, and
a rolling column of gray smoke.

Then another rumble, and another, and then the whole side of
the ridge seemed to open up and move slowly skyward with a
world-wrecking, soul-paralyzing crash. A murky red glare lit up the
smoke screen, and against it a mass of tossed-up debris, and for an
instant I caught the black silhouette of a whole human body
spread-eagled and spinning like a pin-wheel.

Most of our party, even at the distance, were knocked down by the