We were late. For some reason we had decided to watch this one from the
firing-line. We had stayed too long at Brigade Headquarters getting the
details of the night's plan. Just as we hurried out of the end of the
communication trench into the dark jumble of the low sandbag
constructions which formed this part of the firing-line, there came two
bangs from the southward as if someone had hit an iron ship's tank with
a big drumstick. It was our preparatory bombardment which had begun.

A light showed dimly from one or two crevices in our trenches. We peeped
into one. It was very small, and someone was busy in there. The
bombardment was not half a minute old, but it was now continuous along
the whole horizon behind us. The noise was that of a large orchestra of
street boys each heartily banging his kerosene-tin drum. Our shells
streamed overhead with an almost continuous swish.

I do not know why, but some curious sense made one keep low in ducking
round to a bay of the front trench. The enemy's reply was not due for
some minutes yet. There was a sudden lurid red glare with a heavy crash
over the parapet to our right--perhaps 150 yards away. "That's not one
of their 5.9's, surely?" exclaims a friend.

"One of our trench mortars, I think," says another. As we sit in the
narrow trench, with our knees tucked up to our chins, there is no doubt
whatever of the advent of a new sheaf of missiles through the air above
our heads. We can hear the swish of our own shells, perhaps 100 feet up,
and the occasional rustle of some missile passing overhead a good deal
higher than that. One knows that this must be one of our howitzer shells
making his slow path, perhaps 200 or 300 feet above us, on his way to
fall on some German communication trench, and blow it in. I do not know,
but I rather suspect his duty is so to jumble up the walls and banks of