After five minutes of hot shelling the Huns stopped, and Lieutenant M., our guide, proposed that we should continue. The Hun usually caters for those people who ‘carry on’ at once, so we decided to visit a friend whose office was only two doors off. Lieutenant R. was delighted to see us. Yes, this particular Boche battery was ‘dégoûtant.’ It fired like a mitrailleuse, yes, and some of the ‘overs’ came this way. He had the honour to announce to us that ‘there was an unexploded 77-shell in his ceiling—no, it had not been there long and was probably still warm.’ Two more rounds battery fire then came over and we judged the trouble past for the time being. When we reached the battery we found they had had a bad time. It was an old territorial field battery—there was probably not a gunner less than forty in it. One of the guns had had a direct hit. The wheel and part of the carriage were smashed. Two of the other gun emplacements had been knocked in. The German battery responsible for this had been located, and the bearded old Frenchmen were getting ready for retaliation. Three of the guns were already ready for action, and efforts were being made to heave the broken one up on to a temporary carriage so that at least one more shot might be got out of it! A telephone message had been sent up from the brigade asking them to have a guide ready for us, but the matter had been forgotten. There was far more excitement about this than about the bombardment. Lieutenant M. called up the Sergeant-Major and ‘strafed’ him unmercifully. The Sergeant-Major was ‘désolé,’ but at the moment he had been ‘très occupé.’ He was ‘confus’ and would ‘mon capitaine’ accept his apology—the ‘cochons de Bosches’ were far more responsible than he was. Lieutenant M. said it was all right, called him ‘mon vieux,’ and we departed for our post with a fit-up guide who persisted that he did not know the way, but who nevertheless got us there in the end and we had a good look at the enemy lines and the country beyond. On our return we passed a small cottage which had been hit by something big. More than half of it had been blown away and there was no roof left at all. The chimney, however, was still there and it poured forth a defiant stream of smoke as the owner cooked his dinner in a temporary shelter near the fireplace. The French Headquarters mess was more than usually cheery that evening. The enemy had had another setback at Verdun.