It is a small world, for China cropped up here, as it had at brigade headquarters.  The major had been in garrison at Peking when the war began.  If my shipmate on a long battleship cruise, Lt.-Col.  Dion Williams, U.S.M.C, reads this out in Peking let it tell him that the major is just as urbane in the cellar of a second-rate farmhouse on the outskirts of Neuve Chapelle as he would be in a corner of the Peking Club.

“How is it?  Painful now?” asked the major of Captain P-----, on the
other side of the table.

“Oh, no!  It’s quite all right,” said the captain.

“Using the sling?”

“Part of the time.  Hardly need it, though.”

Captain P-----was one of those men whose eyes are always smiling;
who seems, wherever he is, to be glad that he is not in a worse place;
who goes right on smiling at the mud in the trenches and bullets and
shells and death.  They are not emotional, the British, perhaps, but
they are given to cheeriness, if not to laughter, and they have a way
of smiling at times when smiles are much needed.  The smile is more
often found at the front than back at headquarters; or perhaps it is
more noticeable there.

“You see, he got a bullet through the arm yesterday,” the major explained.  “He was reported wounded, but remained on duty in the trench.”  I saw that the captain would rather not have publicity given to such an ordinary incident.  He did not see why people should talk about his arm.  “You are to go with him into the trench for the night,” the major added; and I thought myself very lucky in my companion.

“Aren’t you going to have dinner with us?” the major asked him.

“Why, I had something to eat not very long ago,” said Captain P-----. 
One was not sure whether he had or not.

“There’s plenty,” said the major.

“In that event, I don’t see why I shouldn’t eat when I have a chance,” the captain returned; which I found was a characteristic trench habit, particularly in winter when exposure to the raw, cold air calls for plenty of body-furnace heat.

We had a ration soup and ration ham and ration prunes and cheese; what Tommy Atkins gets.  When we were outside the house and starting for the trench this captain, with his wounded arm, wanted to carry my knapsack.  He seemed to think that refusal was breaking the Hague conventions.

Where we turned off the road, broken finger-points of brick walls in the faint moonlight indicated the site of Neuve Chapelle; other fragments of walls in front of us were the remains of a house; and that broken tree-trunk showed what a big shell can do.  The trunk, a good eighteen inches in diameter, had not only been cut in two by one of the monsters of the new British artillery, but had been carried on for ten feet and left lying solidly in the bed of splinters of the top of the stump.  All this had been in the field of that battle of a day, which was as fierce as the fiercest day at Gettysburg, and fought within about the same space.  Every tree, every square rod of ground, had been paid for by shells, bullets, and human life.