Not long had I returned to my fire trenches before our bombardment opened. The shells streamed over, seeming about to burst in our own trenches, but exploding instead the other side of No Man's Land. Distant booms told us that the Navy had joined in the quarrel. The awful noise of the bombardment, lying so low on our heads, and the deafening detonations of the shells disarrayed all my thoughts. My temples throbbed, my ears sang and whistled, and something began to beat and ache at the back of my head. My brain, crowded with the bombardment, had room for only two clear thoughts--the one, that I was standing with a foot on the firing-step, my revolver cocked in my hand; the other, that, when the mine gave the grand signal, I should clamber mechanically over the parapet and rush into turmoil. Hurry up with that mine--oh, hurry up! My limbs at least were shivering with impatience to be over and away. A great report set the air vibrating; the voice of my sergeant-major shouted: "It's gone up, sir!" a burst of rapid rifle and machine-gun fire, spreading all along the line, showed that the bombers had leapt out of the protection of the trenches and gone over the parapet--and, almost before I had apprehended all these things, I had scrambled over the sand-bags, and was in the open beneath a shower of earth that, blown by the mine into the air, was dropping in clods and particles. Confound the smoke and the dust! I could scarcely see where I was running. The man on my right dropped with a groan. Elsewhere a voice was crying with a blasphemy, "I'm hit!" Bullets seemed to breathe in my face as they rushed past. I stumbled into a hole. I picked myself up, for I saw before me a line of bayonets, glistening where the light caught them. It was my company; and I must be in front of them--not behind. Revolver gripped, I ran through and beyond them, only to fall heavily in a deep depression, which was the Turkish trench. An enemy bayonet was coming like a spear at my breast just as I fired. The shadowy foe fell across my legs. From under him I fired into the breast of another who loomed up to kill me. Then I rose, as a third, with a downward blow from the barrel of his rifle, knocked my revolver spinning from my hand. With an agony in my wrist, I snatched at his rifle, and, wrenching the bayonet free, stabbed him savagely with his own weapon, tearing it away as he dropped. Heavens! would my company never come? I had only been four yards in front of them. Was all this taking place in seconds? One moment of clear reasoning had just told me that this cold dampness, moving along my knee, was the soaking blood of one of my victims, when a Turkish officer ran into the trench-bay, firing backwards and blindly at my sergeant-major. Seeing me, he whipped round his revolver to shoot me. My fist shot out towards his chin in an automatic action of self-defence, and the bayonet, which it held, passed like a pin right through the man's throat. His blood spurted