Page:Great Britain at War.djvu/97

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THE GUNS

"Rather!" nodded the Major, cheerily, "used to think it took three long years to make a gunner once — do it in six short months now! Pretty good going for old England, what? How about a cup of tea in my dugout?"

But evening was approaching, and having far to go we had perforce to refuse his hospitality and bid him a reluctant good-by.

"Don't forget to take a peep at the mine craters," said he, and waving a cheery adieu, vanished into his dugout.

Ten minutes' walk, along the road, and before us rose a jagged mount, and beyond it another, uncanny hills, seared and cracked and sinister, up whose steep slopes I scrambled and into whose yawning depths I gazed in awestruck wonder; so deep, so wide and huge of circumference, it seemed rather the result of some titanic convulsion of nature than the handiwork of man.

I could imagine the cataclysmic roar of the explosion, the smoke and flame of the mighty upheaval and war found for me yet another horror as I turned and de-

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