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[Page 62]
sleep and I said to Partis -"Jerry will be over tonight as sure as fate". Some artillery had come to camp near us and their horses were wandering over the sky-line, about a hundred of them, and they had not only broken our telephone ground - wire - but were easily to be seen from Jerry's balloons. At about 11 o'clock I said to the telephone boy: "Jack, you'd better blow out that light, I can hear a 'plane." "It's not a Schmidt" said Jack, but no sooner had he said it than Brrrrapp! brrrapp! went the bombs. Out went the light and in a second we realised that many Hun 'planes were overhead. The first crumps we heard were not, as usual, in the valley a few hundred yards off but on the very edge of our little wood; and it was evident to me he was searching the wood. And how he did search it! He was looking for those horses. He didn't get them, but he got others belonging to a bunch that hadn't anything to do with attracting him. Six of poor old Partis' hags went and that bomb cleared a space 70 ft. in diameter - razed the trees as would a pair of giant hair clippers and covered everything round with dirt and leaves which were all torn to about confetti size - no - say perhaps the largest would be about the size of a postage stamp. Anyway it they was lying round next morning banked up like green cornflakes. He laid about a hundred of these eggs. Eighteen poor Tommies' fragments were littering one spot and in another, 33 nags' guts - bones - blood, and hair added touches of gruesome colour to the environment. These were the work of big fellows but there were plenty of smaller ones and even grenades, and in addition, he raked the place with gusts of machine gun fire - ! I can tell you I had the wind up. When, coming our way, he started to drop the first of a dozen of ' em, it was some suspense to wait and see where any one of them, up to the 12th, would land. The nearest we got was in between two and the blast shook us and smothered the canvas covers of the dug-outs with lumps of dirt. The emptying of one bomb after another is quick, but he travels at such a rate that the spaces between each are bigger than might be thought - say 30 yards. From 11 till 3-30 a.m. this suspense kept up and by the morning everyone was frazzled. To hear these awful things coming rushing down thro' the air with a terrifying "whrooooo" is a thing to freeze one. Never again