The more bother in taking cover that the Germans can make the British, the better they like it; and the British return the compliment in kind.  Anything that harasses your enemy is counted to the good.  If every shell fired had killed a man in this war, there would be no soldiers left to fight on either side; yet never have shells been so important in war as now.  They can reach the burrowing human beings in shelters which are bulletproof; they are the omnipresent threat of death.  The firing of shells from batteries securely hidden and em-placed represents no cost of life to your side; only cost of material, which ridicules the foolish conclusion that machinery and not men count.  It is because man is still the most precious machine—­a machine that money cannot reproduce—­that gun-machinery is so much in favour, and every commander wants to use shells as freely as you use city water when you do not pay for it by meter.

Now another headquarters and another general, also isolated in a dug-out, holding the reins of his wires over a section of line adjoining the section we had just left.  Before we proceeded we must look over his shelter from shell-storms.  The only time that British generals become boastful is over their dug-outs.  They take all the pride in them of the man who has bought a plot of land and built himself a home; and, like him, they keep on making improvements and calling attention to them.  I must say that this was one of the best shelters I have seen anywhere in the tornado belt; and whatever I am not, I am certainly an expert in dug-outs.  Of course, this general, too, said, “At your own risk!” He was good enough to send a young officer with us up to the trenches; then we should not make any mistakes about direction if we wanted to reach the neighbourhood of the two hundred yards which we had taken from the Germans.  When we thanked him and said “Good-bye!” he remarked: 

“We never say good-bye up here.  It does not sound pleasant.  Make it au revoir.”  He, too, had a twinkle in his eye.

By this time, one leg ought to have been so much longer than the other that one would have walked in a circle if he had not had a guide.

That battery which had been near the dug-out kept on with its regular firing, its shells sweeping overhead.  We had not gone far before we came to a board nailed to a tree, with the caution, “Keep to the right!” If you went to the left you might be seen by the enemy, though we were seeing nothing of him, nor of our own trenches yet.  Every square yard of this ground had been tested by actual experience, at the cost of dead and wounded men, till safe lanes of approach had been found.

Next was a clearing station, where the wounded are brought in from the trenches for transfer to ambulances.  A glance at the burden on a stretcher just arrived automatically framed the word, “Shell-fire!” The stains over-running on tanned skin beyond the edge of the white bandage were bright in the sunlight.  A khaki blouse torn open, or a trousers leg or a sleeve cut down the seam, revealing the white of the first aid and a splash of red, means one man wounded; and by the ones the thousands come.