Night and day for a week, the fearful bombardment continued. Our guns were everywhere, and belching forth without intermission. Dumps of shells were almost as common as sheaves in a corn-field, and processions of ammunition-wagons piled the shells up faster than the gorging guns could take them. The noise was something beyond imagination. It was as though all the devils in hell had come out to demoniacally celebrate the end of the world. We were living--two transport officers and I--in an empty farm-house that, some time before we came in, had been a target for direct hits. One shell had gone through the roof, and another through the gable wall. The windows had been shattered, and the garden and fields were pitted with shell-holes. Our first care had been to look at the cellar, but we had decided, if things became too hot, to make for the open fields. We all slept in the same room, and were at times wakened up by "an arrival" and passed an opinion as to its distance. If, for a time, none came nearer, we turned over and went to sleep again, for a man must sleep even though it be on the edge of a volcano. One morning the servants found a shell nose-cap beneath the window--just that, and nothing more. The week was wearing on. Another morning some of the 7th Middlesex Regiment were in the baths in the village over the way, and a company of the London Scottish was passing by. Two shells fell in the road. The bathers scampered out of the bath and ran naked, here and there, for shelter; the Scottish "scattered"; but some forty-five soldiers, mostly kilted, lay in the road dead or wounded. In the dead of night a party of machine gunners, just returned from the firing-trench, stood outside their billet in our village square debating if they should make a cup of tea before turning in to sleep. A shell decided the matter, and, next morning, I laid two of them to rest in the little cemetery, and the others stood by as mourners.