"By Jove, Milly! We are lucky! It's a good thing it's a fifteen-inch shell. If it had been a small bomb the splinters would have killed us!" We slither and slide to the bottom of the pit and gather fragments of steel. The shell seems a very personal one to my mind, as it has fallen within five feet of me when it was fired twenty-eight miles away. As I turn over a piece of hot metal with my foot it is difficult to believe that that piece of metal ten minutes ago was near Ostend, and now it is here at Dunkerque. I seem to see the portly German sergeant-major in his grey-green uniform pressing the lever on the great gun to cause the mighty explosion which hurled that shell, which is as tall as me and weighed a ton, nearly thirty miles. Even now the coatless gunners sweat at the loading of the next shell into the grooved and shining breech. We have decided that the canal bank is safer, and we hurry in that direction. It is lined with mechanics and officers, sitting low down near the edge of the water. My pilot greets me with mingled reproof and joy. He had seen me stagger out of the smoke of the shell rubbing the more bruised portions of my body, and thinking I was wounded he had sent off for the ambulance. It is rather amusing in the canal. At the end of five minutes some of us become restive, and climb up to the top and walk about. "Charlie," dapper as usual, with his monocle screwed in his eye, sits looking at his watch. "Six minutes!" He says, "Now then, some of you blighters, do you want to get killed?" He lifts the whistle and blows. Leisurely, but not too slowly, we walk down the side of the bank and make ourselves comfortable. We look at our watches. Six minutes and a half have passed since the last explosion. Now comes the uneasy time. We know the gigantic shell will explode somewhere near us in thirty seconds. There will be no warning whistle or sound of any kind. We will simply have to wait. Such precautions and nervousness in regard to shell-fire on active service may sound strange, but it must be remembered that we are twenty-two miles behind the lines, and so have been far, far beyond the range of shell-fire. We have had no previous experience, and there are no dug-outs of any real use for our protection. The seconds slowly pass. People cease talking. Then, somewhere--its position cannot be located by the ear--there is a dull thud. That is the shell actually striking the ground. It has a delay fuse of a fraction of a second. Then the roar leaps out and dies. We rush up to the top of the bank and see the column of smoke just on the other side of the mess. A few seconds later the stones and earth come rattling down on to the roofs of the hangars and huts.