To-night after dinner Fritz, Cockie, Square-Peg, and I discussed the proposition that the hole a shell makes is the safest place, as no two shells ever fall in exactly the same spot. One recalled that very good Tommy story from France when, on being asked why he hadn't taken cover in a Jack Johnson crater as he had been ordered, replied, "Unsafe, sir. I'd rather try another spot and chance it."
"But you know that the same gun never shoots into exactly the same spot twice?"
"Yes, sir. But another gun might."
Fritz and I upheld the theory of probabilities as being against a second shell getting into Cockie's room. For that meant a very precise elevation just clearing the back houses and wall, and meant also the range to a foot or it would get the yard.
Cockie and Square-Peg, on the contrary, held that because one shell has got there and so proved that a shell can get there, another might get there also. I remember painfully suggesting that Cockie ought not to sleep in the room if he thought that another shell might come in, especially as he had no doubt offended the gods over the Nellie incident. This is altogether an extraordinary affair and I am recording it in detail. Well, Cockie went to bed, taking the precaution from my incident of the morning to sleep with his head to the door instead of his feet. We were half undressed when the bombardment reopened. It became so hot that we all took shelter in the mess, the safest place. Indeed the back wall was stopping dozens of them. Later it slackened and we went to bed, whereon it gradually increased. After I had tossed restlessly for half an hour it exceeded the limit, and the plaster and dust were being flung through the doorway of my bedroom. On my way down I inspected the whole of the wall and found the roof all around pulverized. Five minutes later Square-Peg and I were smoking half undressed in the mess when the stunning noise of a splitting crash seemed to burst the world in halves. Débris came into the mess. We thought the shell had entered the tiny yard, but Cockie's voice in unearthly yells quickly disillusioned us.
I shot into the room, which was stifling with fumes and dense yellow gas and smoke. The lamp went out. I told Square-Peg to fetch a doctor and tried to strike a light, but nothing would burn in the thick fumes. I felt for the ruined bed and managed to get him out of the room into the mess. There was a nasty deep gash over the tendon of Achilles, but no bones were broken, although the ligaments were gone and it was bleeding freely, so I applied a first field dressing, as I had so often done in France, and assured him it was not at all serious and that now he was sure to get downstream. Nevertheless poor Cockie's many nerves had been badly shaken. Fritz came and said:
"Let me see. That's good—no bones. Bleeding stopped. Move your foot. Nothing much really. Where else?"
After a fresh spasm Cockie complained that his back seemed cut in two, and this proved a nasty bruise, although the skin wasn't gone. It was a black bruise, and he must have got a pretty hefty knock from a piece of the bed. How he escaped goodness knows. The room was two feet deep in rubbish—topees, uniforms, cameras, bed, everything was wrecked.
We got him to the hospital, and on the way he invented extraordinary futures for each of the stretcher bearers.
Arrived at the hospital I am afraid the whole place was awakened, and some poor fellows whose dying was only a matter of hours or days turned from their fitful sleep on the ground floor to ask who was hit.