There was a window at each end of the dinner-table. No sooner were we seated than there occurred outside one of these windows about the loudest explosion I ever heard. No chair was pushed back, and I am bound to say that was the end of it; they said it was further off than I can yet believe. They also seemed to think it was a bomb. There I trusted they were right. Bombs cannot go on falling on or even about the same place. But in fifteen minutes to the tick we had the same thing outside the other window. This time the glass came tinkling down, and it was thought worth while to inquire whether there were any casualties in the kitchen. There were none: no doubt some chair _would_ have been pushed back if the answer had been in the affirmative. And that was all, except a great deal of shell-talk, and comparison of hair-breadth escapes, between my two hosts (both of whom had borne charmed lives--but who has not, out there?) when the rest were gone, and a shower of stuff in the soft soil of the garden as I was going myself. Perhaps 'shower' is too strong a word; but one of the many things I can still hear is the whizz and burial of at least one lethal fragment close beside us in the dark. The kind pair insisted on walking back with me, and were strong in their advice to me to seek a cellar for the night. This being their own intention, and the idea that I found in the mind of my mate on regaining the Rest Hut, he and I spent the next hour in transferring our beds and bedding to the dungeon aforesaid, where I for one slept all the better for the soothing croon of shells high overhead in waking intervals. It was officially computed that over eight hundred large shells arrived in our little town that day, the historic 21st March, 1918. THE END OF A BEGINNING Two capital nights we passed in our ideal dungeon. It was deep yet dry, miraculously free from rats, and so very heavily vaulted, so tucked away under tons of débris, and yet so protected by the standing ruins, that it was really difficult to imagine the projectile that could join the party. There was, to be sure, a precipitous spiral staircase to the upper air, but even it did not descend straight into our lair. Still, a direct hit on the stairs would have been unpleasant; but one ran as much risk of a direct hit by lightning in peace-time. It seems indecent to gloat over a safety verging on the ignoble at such a time; but those two nights it was hard to help it; and the dim morning light upon the warm brick arches, bent like old shoulders under centuries of romance, added an appeal not altogether to the shrinking flesh.