[14] Shelled.
He looked inquiringly at Pickersdyke. The latter's face portrayed an unholy joy.
"Will I take his place?" he cried. "Lummy! I should think I would. Don't care what the colonel says afterwards. When can I join? Now?"
"As soon as I've seen about getting some more wagons from the B.A.C. we'll go up together," answered Lorrison.
Pickersdyke, who had no conscience whatever on occasions such as this, sent a message to his colonel to say that he was staying up for the night (he omitted to say precisely where!), as there would be much to arrange in the morning. To Scupham he wrote—
"Collect all the kit you can and come up to the battery at once. Say nothing."
He was perfectly aware that he was doing a wildly illegal thing. He felt like an escaped convict breathing the air of freedom and making for his home and family. Forty colonels would not have stopped him at that moment.
II
The major commanding the ——th Battery sat in his dug-out examining a large-scale trench map. His watch, carefully synchronised with those of the staff, lay on the table in front of him. Outside, his six guns were firing steadily, each concussion (and there were twelve a minute) shaking everything that was not a fixture in the little room. Hundreds of guns along miles of front and miles of depth were taking part in the most stupendous bombardment yet attempted by the army. From "Granny," the enormous howitzer that fired six times an hour at a range of seventeen thousand yards, to machine-guns in the front line trenches, every available piece of ordnance was adding its quota to what constituted a veritable hell of noise.