Suddenly hell opened. A barrage was put down upon the field. I can hear to-day as distinctly as I heard it then the close-up crash of German guns, and almost simultaneously with that the cry of the officer in charge of the stretcher, "Scatter!" Then all about us the shells dropped and broke. I suppose that the barrage lasted ten minutes, hardly more, but it was a kind of eternity. It seemed to my terrified eyes that no foot of ground about us was left untouched. That night an observer in our line, on his way back after being relieved, stopped long enough to say that more than two hundred shells fell within a radius of fifty yards from the centre of our party. I sprawled upon my face, and rolled over into a very shallow shell-hole. At my right, and not ten feet away, suddenly a man was lifted into the air; five feet he seemed to go up. He turned over, and came down with a flop into a shell-hole filled with water. Aside from the shock and bruises he was uninjured. The "three-inch" had gone in, by his side and at an angle, almost under him. But in the open and in soft ground high explosives are not particularly dangerous unless they score direct hits. They penetrate so far before they explode that they are largely smothered; and, while they kick up a great commotion, their bark is worse than their bite. Fortunately for our little party, this barrage had no shrapnel mixed with it; had there been shrapnel, the story would be of another sort. But I was so profoundly frightened that I made no distinction between high explosives and shrapnel. I found myself trying to hide behind a rock no larger than a baby's fist. I envied the white dog, which wheeled about on his hind legs, barking angrily in a dozen directions at once, trying to cover each new explosion. I envied not his bark, but his potential speed, and called him a fool for not using it. And then I heard some one say,--or perhaps it was my own heart speaking,--"Run for it!" and faster than I ever left the scratch on a cinder path, in the days when I was credited with 10 1-5 seconds for the hundred-yard dash, I got away. As I ran, I thought of two things. First, I breathed a prayer of thankfulness for the additional five thousand of war-risk life-insurance that I had taken out just before leaving New York; and then I remembered the ancient tale of the colored brother who heard the bullet twice, once when it passed him and once again when he passed it! And I did my best to emulate the hero of the tale. Two men reached headquarters before I did, but they were younger men and unimpeded by trench coats.