An officer calls attention to a shell-proof shelter with the civic pride of a member of a chamber of commerce pointing out the new Union Station.

“Not even a high explosive”—­the kind that bursts on impact after penetration—­“could get into that!” he says.  “We make them for generals and colonels and others who have precious heads on their shoulders.”

With material and labour, the same might have been constructed for the soldiers, which brings us back to the question of munitions in the economic balance against a human life.  It was the first shelter of this kind which I had seen.  You never go up to the trenches without seeing something new.  The defensive is tireless in its ingenuity in saving lives and the offensive in taking them.  Safeguards and salvage compete with destruction.  And what labour all that excavation and construction represented—­the cumulative labour of months and day-by-day repairs of the damage done by shells!  After a bombardment, dig out the filled trenches and renew the smashed dug-outs to be ready for another go!

The walls of that communication trench were two feet above our heads.  We noticed that all the men were in their dug-outs; none were walking about in the open.  One knew the meaning of this barometer—­ stormy.  The German gunners were “strafing” in a very lively way this afternoon.

Already we had noticed many shells bursting five or six hundred yards away, in the direction of the new British trench; but at that distance they do not count.  Then a railroad train seemed to have jumped the track and started to fly.  Fortunately and unfortunately, sound travels faster than big shells of low velocity; fortunately, because it gives you time to be undignified in taking cover; unfortunately, because it gives you a fraction of a second to reflect whether or not that shell has your name and your number on Dug-out Street.

I was certain that it was a big shell, of the kind that will blow a dug-out to pieces.  Anyone who had never heard a shell before would have “scrooched,” as the small boys say, as instinctively as you draw back when the through express tears past the station.  It is the kind of scream that makes you want to roll yourself into a package about the size of a pea, while you feel as tall and large as a cathedral, judging by the sensation that travels down your backbone.

Once I was being hoisted up a cliff in a basket, when the rope on the creaking windlass above slipped a few inches.  Well, it is like that, or like taking a false step on the edge of a precipice.  Is the clock about to strike twelve or not?  Not this time!  The burst was thirty yards away, along the path we had just traversed, and the sound was like the burst of a shell and like nothing else in the world, just as the swirling, boring, growing scream of a shell is like no other scream in the world.  A gigantic hammer-head sweeps through the air and breaks a steel drum-head.