fathers and brothers at the front.

The normal shelling of the afternoon--a scattered bombardment all over
the landscape, which only brings perhaps half a dozen shells to your
immediate neighbourhood once in every ten minutes--has noticeably
quickened. The German is obviously turning on more batteries. The light
field-gun shrapnel is fairly scattered as before. But 5.9-inch howitzers
are being added to it. Except for his small field guns, the German makes
little use of guns. His work is almost entirely done with howitzers. He
possesses big howitzers--8-inch and larger--as we do. But the backbone
of his artillery is the 5.9 howitzer; and after that probably the 4.2.

The shells from both these guns are beginning to fall more thickly. Huge
black clouds shoot into the air from various parts of the foreground,
and slowly drift away across the hill-top. Suddenly there is a
descending shriek, drawn out for a second or more, coming terrifyingly
near; a crash far louder than the nearest thunder; a colossal thump to
the earth which seems to move the whole world about an inch from its
base; a scatter of flying bits and all sorts of under-noises, rustle of
a flying wood splinter, whir of fragments, scatter of falling earth.
Before it is half finished another shriek exactly similar is coming
through it. Another crash--apparently right on the crown of your head,
as if the roof beams of the sky had been burst in. You can just hear,
through the crash, the shriek of a third and fourth shell as they come
tearing down the vault of heaven--_crash--crash_. Clouds of dust are
floating over you. A swifter shriek and something breaks like a glass
bottle in front of the parapet, sending its fragments slithering low
overhead. It bursts like a rainstorm, sheet upon sheet, _smash, smash,
smash_, with one or two more of the heavier shells punctuating the
shower of the lighter ones. The lighter shell is shrapnel from field