came on to rain.  We exclaimed with dismay.  We had neglected to bring our ponchos.  “If we don’t get back to the village at once,” we assured each other, “we will get wet!” So we raced through half a mile of falling shells and bullets and, before the rain fell, got under cover.  Then Bass said:  “For twelve hours we stuck to that trench because we were afraid if we left it we would be killed.  And the only reason we ever did leave it was because we were more afraid of catching cold!”

In the same war I was in a trench with some infantrymen, one of whom never raised his head.  Whenever he was ordered to fire he would shove his rifle-barrel over the edge of the trench, shut his eyes, and pull the trigger.  He took no chances.  His comrades laughed at him and swore at him, but he would only grin sheepishly and burrow deeper.  After several hours a friend in another trench held up a bag of tobacco and some cigarette-papers and in pantomime “dared” him to come for them.  To the intense surprise of every one he scrambled out of our trench and, exposed against the sky-line, walked to the other trench and, while he rolled a handful of cigarettes, drew the fire of the enemy.  It was not that he was brave; he had shown that he was not.  He was merely stupid.  Between death and cigarettes, his mind could not rise above cigarettes.

Why the same kind of people are so differently affected by danger is very hard to understand.  It is almost impossible to get a line on it.  I was in the city of Rheims for three days and two nights while it was being bombarded.  During that time fifty thousand people remained in the city and, so far as the shells permitted, continued about their business.  The other fifty thousand fled from the city and camped out along the road to Paris.  For five miles outside Rheims they lined both edges of that road like people waiting for a circus parade.  With them they brought rugs, blankets, and loaves of bread, and from daybreak until night fell and the shells ceased to fall they sat in the hay-fields and along the grass gutters of the road.  Some of them were most intelligent-looking and had the manner and clothes of the rich.  There was one family of five that on four different occasions on our way to and from Paris we saw seated on the ground at a place certainly five miles away from any spot where a shell had fallen.  They were all in deep mourning, but as they sat in the hay-field around a wicker tea basket and wrapped in steamer-rugs they were comic.  Their lives were no more valuable than those of thousands of their fellow townsfolk who in Rheims were carrying on the daily routine.  These kept the shops open or in the streets were assisting the Red Cross.