‘Will I take his place?’ he cried. ‘Lummy! I should think I would. Don’t care what the colonel says afterwards. When can I join? Now?’ ‘As soon as I’ve seen about getting some more wagons from the B.A.C. we’ll go up together,’ answered Lorrison. Pickersdyke, who had no conscience whatever on occasions such as this, sent a message to his colonel to say that he was staying up for the night (he omitted to say precisely where!), as there would be much to arrange in the morning. To Scupham he wrote: ‘Collect all the kit you can and come up to the battery at once. _Say nothing._’ He was perfectly aware that he was doing a wildly illegal thing. He felt like an escaped convict breathing the air of freedom and making for his home and family. Forty colonels would not have stopped him at that moment. II. The major commanding the ⸺th Battery sat in his dug-out examining a large-scale trench map. His watch, carefully synchronised with those of the staff, lay on the table in front of him. Outside, his six guns were firing steadily, each concussion (and there were twelve a minute) shaking everything that was not a fixture in the little room. Hundreds of guns along miles of front and miles of depth were taking part in the most stupendous bombardment yet attempted by the army. From ‘Granny,’ the enormous howitzer that fired six times an hour at a range of seventeen thousand yards, to machine guns in the front line trenches, every available piece of ordnance was adding its quota to what constituted a veritable hell of noise. The major had been ordered to cut the wire entanglements between two given points and to stop firing at 4.30 A.M. precisely. He had no certain means of knowing whether he had completed his task or not. He only knew that his ‘lines of fire,’ his range, and his ‘height of burst’ as previously registered in daylight were correct, that his layers could be depended upon, and that he had put about a thousand rounds of shrapnel into a hundred and fifty yards of front. At 4.29 he rose and stood, watch in hand, in the doorway of his dug-out. A man with a megaphone waited at his elbow. The major, war-worn though he was, was still young enough in spirit to be thrilled by the mechanical regularity of his battery’s fire. This perfection of drill was his work, the result of months and months of practice, of loving care, and of minute attention to detail. Dawn was beginning to creep into the sky, and he could just distinguish the silhouettes of the two right-hand guns. The flash as one of them fired revealed momentarily the figures of the gunners grouped round the breech like demons round some spectral engine of destruction. Precisely five seconds afterwards a second flash denoted that the next gun had fired—and so on in sequence from right to left until it was the turn of Number One again. ‘Stop,’ said the major when the minute hand of his watch was exactly over the half-hour. ‘Stop!’ roared the man with the megaphone.