Then suddenly came four distant bangs from the right of our lines (as we faced them), and with “wang--wang ... wang--wang” four whizz-bangs burst right around us, with most appalling flickers. “Bang--bang ... bang--bang” in the distance again, and I braced every muscle tightly, as you do when you prepare to meet a shock. Behind us, and just in front, the beastly things burst. I lay with every fibre in my body strained to the uttermost. And yet I confess I enjoyed the sensation! There was a lull, and I began crawling as fast as I could. I stopped to see if Will was following. “By God,” I heard, “let’s get out of this.” So I was thinking! Then as I went on I saw the edge of a crater. Where on earth? I halted and pulled out my compass. Due south I wanted. I found I was bearing off to the right far too much, so with compass in hand I corrected my course. Some crawling this time! It was not long before we could see wire in the distance. Then I got up and ran. How I got through that wire I don’t know; I tore my puttees badly, and must have made a most unnecessary rattling. After which I fell into the ditch. “Thank heaven you’re all right,” was the greeting from Captain Robertson. “I was just coming out after you. Those d--d artillery fellows. I sent down at once to ’phone to them to stop....” And so on. I hardly heard a word. I was so elated, I could not listen. As we went back to Trafalgar Square for dinner, I heard them warning the sentries “The patrol’s in.” I looked up at the sandbag parapet. “In,” I thought. “One does not realise what ‘in’ is, till one’s been out.” I have been out several times later. I never had any adventures much. But always, before going out, I felt the shivers of the bather; and always, after I came in, a most splendid glow. CHAPTER X “WHOM THE GODS LOVE” “No officer wounded since we came out in October,” said Edwards: “we’re really awfully lucky, you know.” “For heaven’s sake, touch wood,” I cried. We laughed, for the whole of our establishment was wood. We were sitting on a wooden seat, leaning our hands against wooden uprights, eating off a wooden table, and resting our feet on a wooden floor. Sometimes, too, we found splinters of wood in the soup--but it was more often straw. For this dining-room in Trafalgar Square was known sometimes as the “Summer-house” and sometimes as the “Straw Palace.” It was really the maddest so-called “dug-out” in the British lines, I should think; I might further add, “in any trench in Europe.” For the French, although they presumably built it in the summer days of 1915 when the Bois Français trenches were a sort of summer-rest for tired-out soldiers, would never have tolerated the “Summer-house” since the advent of the canister-age. As for the Boche, he would have merely stared if anyone had suggested him using it as a Company Headquarters. “But,” he would have said, “it is not shell-proof.”