first pair, carrying a box between them, and take one side of the box from one of the seamen, and immediately feel delighted with myself, the sailor, and everybody. I have got a definite job. Up we pant; half-way up the cliff, I find Foley on the same job. A voice shouts, “Have you got the ammunition, Foley?” It is O’Hara’s voice, our D.A.Q.M.G., and he comes running down to us. Suddenly the Fleet open fire, and the infernal din begins all over again, the flashes lighting up the beach, silhouetting men on shore and ships lying off, and all the time the song of bullets. Red Hell and a Sunday night! And this is war at last! I never thought I should ever get as near it as this, when I was a civilian. O’Hara says, “Who’s that?” to me, and I answer my name, and he says, “Righto! give us a hand with this little lot, lad.” He bends down, and he and a sailor lift a box. Foley and I lift another, and six seamen (I find they are off the _Implacable_) lift the others, and off we pant up the cliff over that third-line trench, lined with men of the beach parties with fixed bayonets. It’s a devil of a walk to the second line, and it reminds me of hurrying to the railway station with a heavy portmanteau to catch a train. Foley and I constantly change hands. The seamen too find it heavy going. We arrive at the second line and run into the Adjutant of the Lancashire Fusiliers, calmly walking up and down his trench with a stick. We halt, open the boxes, and hang the strings of ammunition around our necks and over our shoulders. I am almost weighed down with the load. We have a rest, taking cover in the trench now and again as bullets come rather thicker than usual. The firing is frightful—now a roar of musketry, and now desultory firing—while the ships’ guns boom away in the same spasmodic way. O’Hara then says, “Come along; follow me,” and we go, headed by the Adjutant of the Lancashire Fusiliers to show us the way, and on over the grass and gorse into the blackness beyond. We are lucky, for it is a quiet moment and we have only to go three or four hundred yards, but just as we approach the first line, out bursts a spell of machine gun and rifle fire—rapid—and I fall headlong into what I think is space, but which proves to be our front-line trench. I fall clean on top of a Tommy, who is the opposite of polite, for my ammunition slings had tapped his nose painfully. I apologize, and feeling a bit done, lie down in the mud like a frog, the coolness of the mud soon reviving me. We pass the ammunition along, each man keeping two or three slings. O’Hara wanders along the trench, having to keep his head low, for it is none too deep and bullets are pretty free overhead, while I remain and chat to the Tommy, another Lancashire Fusilier, who is shivering, with teeth chattering and wet through, for it is raining. A Tommy on the other side of me is fast asleep and snoring loudly. The one awake describes to me the landing of the previous early morning, the machine