Hairbreadth escapes are related in hundreds of letters, and they have a dramatic quality that makes the ineffectual fires of imaginative fiction burn very low.  Sergeant E.W.  Turner, West Kents, writes to his sweetheart:  “The bullet that wounded me at Mons went into one breast pocket and came out of the other, and in its course passed through your photo.”  Private G. Ryder vouches for this:  “We were having what you might call a dainty afternoon tea in the trenches under shell fire.  The mugs were passed round with the biscuits and the ‘bully’ as best they could by the mess orderlies, but it was hard work messing through without getting more than we wanted.  My next-door neighbor, so to speak, got a shrapnel bullet in his tin, and another two doors off had his biscuit shot out of his hand.”  Lieutenant A.C.  Johnstone, the Hants county cricketer, after escaping other bullets and shells which were dancing around him, was hit over the heart by a spent bullet, which on reaching hospital he found in his left-hand breast pocket.  Private Plant, Manchester Regiment, had a cigarette shot out of his mouth, and a comrade got a bullet into his tin of bully beef.  “It saves the trouble of opening it,” was his facetious remark.

One of the Royal Scots Fusiliers was saved by a cartridge clip.  He felt the shock and thought he had been hit, but the bullet was diverted by the impact owing to a loose cartridge.  Had it been struck higher up all the cartridges might have exploded.  Another letter mentions a case where a man got two bullets; one struck his cartridge belt, and the other entered his sleeve and passed through his trousers as far as the knee, without even scratching him.  Drummer E. O’Brien, South Lancashires, had his bugle and piccolo smashed, his cap carried away by a bullet, and another bullet through his coat before he was finally struck by a piece of shrapnel which injured his ankle; and another soldier records thus his adventures under fire:  (1) Shell hit and shattered my rifle; (2) Cap shot off my head; (3) Bullet in muscle of right arm.  “But never mind, my dear,” he comments, “I had a good run for my money.”  Staff-Sergeant J.W.  Butler, 1st Lincolns, was saved by a paper pad in his pocket book; the bullet embedded itself there.

Sapper McKenny, Royal Engineers, records the unique experience of a comrade whose cap was shot off so neatly that the bullet left a groove in his hair just like a barber’s parting!  He thinks the German who fired the shot is probably a London hairdresser.

Private J. Drury, 3rd Coldstream Guards, also had a narrow escape, being hit by a bullet out of a shell between the left eye and the temple.  “It struck there,” he relates, “but one of our men got it out with a safety pin, and now I’ve got it in my pocket!”

The amusing escapade of “wee Hecky MacAlister,” is told by Private T. McDougall, of the Highland Light Infantry.  Hecky went into a burn for a swim, and suddenly found the attentions of the Germans were directed to him.  “You know what a fine mark he is with his red head,” says the writer to his correspondent, and so they just hailed bullets at him.  Hecky, however, “dooked and dooked,” and emerged from his bath happy but breathless after his submarine exploit.