To-day I was able to see what a German seventeen-inch shell could do; one had made a crater fifty feet across and twenty feet deep in the middle of the road. The top of the road was paved—think it over—and pieces kill at a thousand yards. Thirty horses were buried in another hole. ------------------------------------- I have been given a special job by the general to enfilade a wood over the Mound. I have my section now in the second-line trenches waiting till it is dark before making a move. We have to make a machine-gun emplacement in a piece of ground which is decidedly unhealthy to visit during daylight. I have been there in daylight, but I had to creep out of it. On the map it is called a farm, but the highest wall is only three feet six inches high. ------------------------------------- Arrived home about two o’clock this morning. We crawled to the place we have to take up, and I put some men filling sandbags in the ruins and others even digging a dugout. The enemy had “the wind up” and were using a great number of star shells. When one goes up we all “freeze,” remain motionless, or lie still. They send them up to see across their front, and if they locate a working party, then they start playing a tune with their machine guns. Bullets and shells whistled through the trees all the time. They seemed to come from all directions. The men didn’t like it at all. I wasn’t altogether comfortable myself, but an officer must keep going. I walked about and joked and laughed with them. The range-taker said, “Some of us are getting the didley-i-dums, Sir.” I don’t know what that is, but I had a feeling that I had them too. Of course, to start with, everybody thinks every single shell and bullet is coming straight for him. Then you find out how much space there is around you. One man came to tell me that two men were firing at him with his own rifle from the ruins of the alleged farmhouse, ten yards away from the dugout we are making. Just then a field mouse squeaked, and he jumped up in the air and said, “There’s another.” I told the men to fill sandbags from the ruins; they all crowded behind this three-foot-six wall for protection; they dug up a French needle bayonet—that was all right, but they afterwards dug up a rifle and I noticed a suspicious smell, so I moved them. We came home very tired. We are attacking Hooge, a counter-attack, to take back trenches lost in the liquid fire attack—you will hear what we did from the papers, probably in three months’ time. -------------------------------------