During the first few minutes of that tremendous excitement we did not bother much about the gun drill-book--I, for instance, was loading, setting fuses, ranging and doing any other work that came to hand. Despite this there was nothing whatever to grumble about in the way the guns were being served. In the darkness we could not see what mischief we were doing, but we knew perfectly well that it must be enormous, because of the rapidity of our fire and the goodness of our shells; and when the daylight came we had proof, for ahead of us were piles of Turkish corpses, men who had been killed by our shrapnel. We went on firing till the Turks had been driven back in complete disorder. We kept the game up throughout the day, but the darkness prevented us from following the enemy’s movements. We, of course, had no observation-posts at that time, as there were no trenches available for the observation officers to get to know the results of our fire. After this promising start things were fairly quiet till the small hours of the next morning, when the enemy counter-attacked with great fury. The Turks are rare good fighters, they knew the country, and they had German officers driving them on in the rear, brutes who shot them down without mercy time after time, as I saw with my own eyes. There were some native troops on our right front, and these were so hard pressed that they were forced to give way. A staff officer who was at hand realised instantly the serious state of the situation, as the line was broken, and he called on some of the gunners in our brigade to fill the gap. About fifty of our men fell out at once. There were hundreds of rifles with fixed bayonets lying on the ground around us, and grabbing what they wanted of these, our men rushed up and joined in the fray, filling the gap and making good the broken line before the Turks could understand what was happening. It was a smart little affair, and the enemy was driven back and had to scuttle for shelter to his trenches, where he was left for the time being, for our troops were utterly exhausted and a rest was necessary. We were thankful for a bit of a break. It was not for long, but we took things fairly easily till just before midday, when another advance was ordered against Seddul Bahr, a village of great tactical importance some hundreds of yards away, on our right front. Our brigade was ordered to get ready for action. By this time we were better off than we had been, for we had established the necessary observation-posts, and so we were ready for anything that might happen. At noon the order came to open fire, and we fairly rained shells into the village--hundreds of rounds of shrapnel--to help the infantry in their advance. The Turks were just as ready as we were, and they started a bombardment both from Achi Baba and the Turkish forts on the Asiatic side.