“We’ll soon be out of it, Kat.”

He is nervous. “I don’t know, I don’t know⁠—”

We come to the communication-trench and then to the open fields. The little wood reappears; we know every foot of ground here. There’s the cemetery with the mounds and the black crosses.

That moment it breaks out behind us, swells, roars, and thunders. We duck down⁠—a cloud of flame shoots up a hundred yards ahead of us.

The next minute under a second explosion part of the wood rises slowly in the air, three or four trees sail up and then crash to pieces. The shells begin to hiss like safety-valves⁠—heavy fire⁠—

“Take cover!” yells somebody⁠—“Cover!”

The fields are flat, the wood is too distant and dangerous⁠—the only cover is the graveyard and the mounds. We stumble across in the dark and as though he had been spat there every man lies glued behind a mound.