Direct hits were very rare, but on one occasion I had the satisfaction of seeing a machine-gun hurled over the Turkish parados. The 82nd was an excellent battery, and shot well. It was great fun ranging on the new trenches that had begun to appear since the night. We blew one whole trench completely out of shape and there was a stampede of Turkish heads. Great luck decreed that two shells, on different days, both premature, should scatter shrapnel in our trenches, while emptied for safety. On one occasion Major Nelson, of the West Kents, I, and my signaller were there standing at the end of a traverse. A kerosene tin and some utensils were scuppered between us, and dozens of our shrapnel bullets buried themselves in the wall of the trench. But incidents of this nature grew too numerous for mention, and happened to many. Another round from a cold gun landed into the cookhouse of the 76th Punjabis. No one was there, but the cookhouse was not improved. Another tragic premature killed a private of the Hants and badly wounded a second. Some of the shrapnel of this burst reached to where I was in the trenches nine hundred yards away. We were in daily dread of another attack, and at night all our guns were placed on their night-lines, each to its zone, just over our trenches. On the first indication of a general attack we thus made a curtain of fire that the Turks funked breaking through. Two or three times a night we would sometimes have to go into action for this purpose. The West Kents improved their trenches splendidly, and made them quite comfortable. A very nice regiment they were, and on many occasions I have been grateful for their hospitality at a breakfast. They had a wee wooden home-made trench-mortar that we christened "Grasshopper," as every time he was fired he jumped, sometimes several feet back over the parados, out of the trench, and had to be recovered with lassos. Once he tried to range to some trenches farther away, and blew himself to small bits. The casualties during these first weeks were very heavy. Our line was short, scarcely more than a mile and a half, and the enemy swept this with fair regularity. The fatigue parties often had to risk going over the top in the night, and there was almost always a casualty. I often think of my great luck on that night when I went for the guns. Nor shall I easily forget the first time I was in a trench when an attack began. This trench was about eighty yards from ours, and the rate of fire was terrific, but not so fast as ours. The Turks well knew that although only eighty yards had to be crossed nothing human could arrive. My trench incidents would fill a volume, which I have no time to write, and even with time it would be difficult to isolate individual instances of extraordinary routine.