in hand, for an enemy that would not come, while a captive balloon a mile or two away to the eastward and an aeroplane sailing far overhead gave the ranges, and they waited for the shrapnel to burst.  The trenches were hasty affairs, narrow and shoulder-deep, very like trenches for gas or water pipes, and reasonably safe except when a shell burst directly overhead.  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.  A raincoat hanging to a nail in this timber was literally shot to shreds.  “That’s where I was standing,” said the young lieutenant in command, pointing with a dry smile to a spot not more than a yard from where the shell had burst.

Half a dozen young fellows, crouched there in the bomb-proof, looked out at us and grinned.  They were brand-new soldiers, some of them, boys from the London streets who had answered the thrilling posters and signs, “Your King and Country Need You,” and been sent on this ill-fated expedition for their first sight of war.  The London papers are talking about it as I am writing this—­how this handful of nine thousand men, part of them recruits who scarcely knew one end of a rifle from another, were flung across the Channel on Sunday night and rushed up to the front to be shot at and rushed back again.  I did not know this then, but wondered if this was what they had dreamed of—­squatting helplessly in a ditch until another order came to retire—­when they swung through the London streets singing “It’s a long, long way to Tipperary” two months before.

Yet not one of the youngest and the greenest showed the least nervousness as they waited there in that melancholy little orchard under the incessant scream of shells.  That unshakable British coolness, part sheer pluck, part a sort of lack of imagination, perhaps, or at least of “nerves,” left them as calm and casual as if they were but drilling on the turf of Hyde Park.  And with it persisted that almost equally unshakable sense of class, that touching confidence in one’s superiors—­ the young clerk’s or mechanic’s inborn conviction that whatever that smart, clean-cut, imperturbable young officer does and says must inevitably be right—­at least, that if he is cool and serene you must, if the skies fall, be cool and serene too.

We met one young fellow as we walked through an empty lateral leading to a bomb-proof prepared for wounded, and the ambulance officer asked him sharply how things had been going that morning.

“Oh, very well, sir,” he said with the most respectful good humor, though a shell bursting just then a stone’s throw beyond the orchard made both of us duck our heads.  “A bit hot, sir, about nine o’clock, but only one man hurt.  They do seem to know just where we are, sir; but wait till their infantry comes up—­we’ll clean them out right enough, sir.”