Fifty wounded men on the floor of a clearing station and the individual is lost in the crowd.  When you see the one borne past, if there is nothing else to distract attention you always ask two questions:  Will he die?  Has he been maimed for life?  If the answers to both are no, you feel a sense of triumph, as if you had seen a human play, built skilfully around a life to arouse your emotions, turn out happily.

The man has fought in an honourable cause; he has felt the touch of death’s fingers.  How happy he is when he knows that he will get well!  In prospect, as his wound heals into the scar which will be the lasting decoration of his courage, his home and all that it means to him.  What kind of a home has he, this private soldier?  In the slums, with a slattern wife, or in a cottage with a flower garden in front, only a few minutes’ walk from the green fields of the English countryside?  But we set out to tell you about the kind of inferno in which this man got his splash of red.

We come to the banks of a canal which has carried the traffic of the Low Countries for many centuries; the canal where British and French had fought many a Thermopylae in the last eight months.  Along its banks run rows of fine trees, narrowing in perspective before the eye.  Some have been cut in two by the direct hit of a heavy shell and others splintered down, bit by bit.  Others still standing have been hit many times.  There are cuts as fresh as if the chips had just flown from the axeman’s blow, and there are scars from cuts made last autumn which nature’s sap, rising as it does in the veins of wounded men, has healed, while from the remaining branches it sent forth leaves in answer to the call of spring.

In this section the earth is many-mouthed with caves and cut with passages running from cave to cave, so that the inhabitants may go and come hidden from sight.  Jawbone and Hairyman and Lowbrow, of the Stone Age, would be at home there, squatting on their hunkers and tearing at their raw kill with their long incisors.  It does not seem a place for men who walk erect, wear woven fabrics, enjoy a written language, and use soap and safety razors.  One would not be surprised to see some figure swing down by a long, hairy arm from a branch of a tree and leap on all fours into one of the caves, where he would receive a gibbering welcome to the bosom of his family.

Not so!  Huddled in these holes in the earth are free-born men of an old civilization, who read the daily papers and eat jam on their bread.  They do not want to be there, but they would not consider themselves worthy of the inheritance of free-born men if they were not.  Only civilized man is capable of such stoicism as theirs.  They have reverted to the cave-dweller’s protection because their civilization is so highly developed that they can throw a piece of steel weighing from eighteen to two thousand pounds anywhere from five to twenty miles with merciless accuracy, and because the flesh of man is even more tender than in the cave-dweller’s time, not to mention that his brain-case is a larger target.