Our bombardment is the most uplifting and exciting thing.  So fast do the shells fly over and detonate on the enemy ground that it is almost impossible to distinguish the isolated shell-bursts; they are lost in one dense fog of smoke.  Just now we ceased to be rational as we stood watching it.  “That’s the stuff to give ’em!” cried a Tommy in his excitement.  “Pump it over!  Pump it over!” and, as some German sand-bags flew into the air:  “Gee!  Look at that!  Are we downhearted?  NO!  ’Ave we won?  YES!” And I wanted to throw up my hat and cheer.  There seized me the sensation I got when my house was winning on the football-ground at school.  “We’re on top!  On top of the Boche, and he asked for it!”

I have now returned to my dug-out, feeling it in my heart to be sorry for the Germans.  I am impatient to finish my story, for we go over the top in the morning.

Sec.2

It is in a letter just arrived from my mother that we find Monty’s last word—­his footnote to this history.  She describes a ceremony which she attended at Kensingtowe, the unveiling of a memorial in the chapel to the Old Kensingtonians who fell at Gallipoli.  Monty, as an old Peninsula padre, had been invited to preach the sermon.  My mother writes in her womanly way: 

     “He preached a wonderful sermon.  We all thought him like a man
     who had seen terrible things, and was passionately anxious that
     somehow good should come of it all.

“Calvary, he said, was a sacrifice offered by a Holy Family.  There was a Father Who gave His Son, because He so loved the world; a mother who yielded up her child, whispering (he doubted not):  ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord’; and a Son Who went to His death in the spirit of the words:  ’In the volume of the Book it was written of me that I should do Thy will, O my God; I am content to do it.’

“And, in days to come, England must remember that once upon a time she, too, was a Holy Family; for there had been years in which she was composed of fathers who so loved the world that they gave their sons; of mothers who whispered, as their boys set their faces for Gallipoli or Flanders:  ’Behold the handmaid of the Lord’ (and oh, Rupert, I felt so ashamed to think how badly I behaved that last night before you went to Gallipoli—­how rebellious I was!).  He went on to speak of the sons, and what do you think he said?  He spoke of one who, the evening before the last attack at Cape Helles, asked him:  ’Will you take care of these envelopes, in case—­’ He declared that this simple sentence was, in its shy English way, a reflection of the words:  ’It was written of me that I should do Thy will; I am content to do it.’

“That boy, an old Kensingtonian, was mortally hit in the morning.  There was another with him, also an old Kensingtonian, who was still alive, and might yet come marching home with the victorious army.

     “I lost his next words, for there I broke down.  But I seem to
     remember his saying: