Things were quiet on this sector of the Front that afternoon, though Italian Field Guns were bursting shrapnel from time to time over the Tamburo.

For six weeks did Dustbinattached for rations and disciplineaccompany us on our sanitary rounds; set us a fine example of indifference to shell fire, even to the extent of attempting to catch spent shrapnel as it fell; and proved the wettest of wet blankets to the "socials" of the local rats.

I counted seventy-four shrapnel that burst in a circle of half a mile around us in about two hours, and yet we had no more than about eighteen casualties.

I am reminded again of the days during the Boer war, when one realised that it had never occurred to our happy-go-lucky Army that it was possible to make a military use of barbed wire or construct a trench to defy shrapnel.

One had struck that morning just on the inner rim of the trench, blown out one of those crater-like holes, and discharged all its shrapnel backward across the trench and into one of the heavy timbers supporting a bombproof roof.

Brother Boche, a prey to nervous qualms, is keeping his courage up by distributing shrapnel along our communication-trenches.

"The commander of this battery tells me that yesterday the French dropped some shrapnel among his guns and killed a man or two.

It wasn't many minutes before I realized that, standing near a battery, the execution of which must have been noted on the Russian side, I had a fine chance of experiencing shrapnel bursting overhead.

A strange business for a fifteen- inch naval gun to be firing shrapnel.

The Japs by this time had recovered from their first shock, and began to open fire on the train, which steamed slowly back to the far end of the station, when it came to a standstill and pumped shrapnel along our front.

Most like, they are already in position on the heights above us, ready to rain their shrapnel upon the unbelievers.

The order was to construct a firing trench, and that meant a good deal more work than had been done, so reliefs were kept going and the work progressed steadily all night, a good deal of impetus being given to it by some light German field-guns which commenced to scatter high-explosive shrapnel over the open ground.

If those cruisers steaming across the range had been sending six or eight-inch shrapnel, we should have preferred not to be so near that towed square of canvas.

"It makes you sick to see the way that the Germans literally walk into the very mouth of the machine guns and cannon spouting short-fused shrapnel that mow down their lines and tear great gaps in them," said a Belgian major who was badly wounded.

But where the object of the enemy is the injury of individuals, and not the destruction of buildings, they often use shrapnel, and the resulting wounds resemble those from the old smooth-bore guns of our ancestors.

" Every day I read some of these lists, finding a tragedy in every line, and wondering whether any of these missing people were among those whom I had met in the guard vans of troop trains, huddled among their bundles, or on wayside platforms, or in the long columns of retreating inhabitants from a little town deep in a wooded valley below the hills where German guns were vomiting their shrapnel.

But the massiveness of the Cathedral has withstood German shrapnel.