[Footnote 1: It was not till a later date that gases were employed, the effects of which were increased by rain.]
Between nine and ten p.m. I heard a series of soft bursts just across the river and arranged with Romano's Battery for mutual alarms if any gas should come too near. An hour later I was relieved in the Command Post and turned in. As I was undressing, I heard the wind rising again and the telephonists next door baling out their dug-out. We were keeping up a desultory fire all night to harass any further attacks that might be attempted. The Major, who had been out on a Front Line Reconnaissance that morning in the neighbourhood of Merna, had come in for some very heavy shelling and returned very weary.
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The next day, the 25th, was at least fine; it was even rather sunny. We did a little firing, but not much, between seven a.m. and two p.m. Enemy planes came over continually, flying very low, about thirty in the course of the morning. They attacked one of our observation balloons, which descended rapidly as they approached, and I think got down safely. Italian anti-aircraft guns brought down one of them. Whenever we shelled Mandria, a little village up the valley, a plane came over. Evidently they had something there as to which they were sensitive, perhaps a General's Billet!
At half past ten the Italians ditched a lorry full of ammunition just at the top of the road from the Battery position to Pec village, in full view of the enemy on Hill 464. At this time the village was being heavily shelled by 5.9's, and our cookhouse on the outskirts was all but hit, shells bursting all round it in a circle. Showers of bricks and lumps of earth and masonry rose high in the air. One shell hit the Artillery Group Headquarters of Major Borghese and I saw all his office papers going up, a cloud of shreds, shining in the sun. I laughed and said to myself, "There goes a lot of red tape!" I saw Borghese himself later in the day limping along with a stick; a chunk of one of his office walls had fallen on his foot.
The enemy meanwhile had begun to shell the lorry, methodically as their idiotic habit was, with one shell every five minutes. It was too near us to be pleasant, so the Major took out a party and hauled it out of their view under cover of a bank. But this took some time. Leary stood by with a stopwatch calling out the minutes. At the end of every fourth minute, the party ran for cover. Then a few seconds later we heard the next shell coming. The Major was hit on the hand once by a shell splinter which drew blood, but nothing more serious than this happened.
About two o'clock a big bombardment worked up again, and the Volconiac and Faiti became a sea of smoke and flame. This went on till dusk, we firing hard all the time. More enemy planes came over, one even after dark, a most unusual thing, flying very low indeed, under a heavy fire of anti-aircraft Batteries and machine guns from the ground. Our planes had been very scarce all day. They had nearly all gone north. For the time being we had quite lost the command of the air in this sector.
The two British Batteries who were furthest forward had orders to move back that night to reserve positions on San Michele. The Italians were going to horse their guns, for it was said that the majority of the tractors had gone north too. This move looked rather panicky, I thought.
Many red rockets went up in the early evening from Volconiac and Faiti. The enemy were making another attack. Then a little later tricolour rockets, red, white and green, went up. This was the signal that the attack had been beaten off and that the situation was quiet again. The firing died down about seven. We fed and put up for the night an Italian officer, whose Battery used to be here, but had moved north yesterday. He had just come back from a gas course at Palmanova. From a newspaper which he had I saw that a strong offensive had begun on the afternoon of the 23rd to the north of the Bainsizza Plateau. Either the attacks here were only holding attacks, or the attack to the north was a feint and the real thing was to be here. Anyhow, I thought, it is their Last Despairing Great Cry! I turned in just after midnight. The night was still and there was a bright moon and stars. A thick mist lay along the Vippacco, just behind the trees. The air was damp and cold. It seemed pretty quiet for the moment all along the Front.
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