A flash of flame less than fifty yards from the casualty clearing station was followed immediately by a loud explosion that hurt her ears and Lucy flinched. The sound of the gun subsided to be replaced by the background rumble. Another explosion followed a little further away. The flash illuminated a huge gun with two large springs beneath the barrel. The towering wheels were fitted with flat plates, arranged on pivots around the rim to prevent the gun sinking into the mud. That would have been one of the new howitzers, the ones they’d developed to blast the Fritz trenches, but why did they have to put them so close to a hospital? She thought of the stories she’d heard about the German artillery concentrating counter-fire onto these guns once they discovered their location.
Beyond the gun
