"Yes, this was pretty heavy shell-fire," said an officer who ought to know. "Not so bad as on the trenches which the infantry are to attack —that is the first degree. You might call this the second."
It was heavy enough to keep any writer from being bored. The second degree will do. We will leave the first until another time.
Later, when we were walking along a paved road, I heard again what seemed the siren call of a nine-inch.
Once, in another war, I had been on a paved road when—well, I did not care to be on this one if a nine-inch hit it and turned fragments of paving-stones into projectiles. An effort to "run out the bunt"—Caesar's ghost! It was one of our own shells! Nerves! Shame! Two stretcher- bearers with a wounded man looked up in surprise, wondering what kind of a hide-and-seek game we were playing. They made a picture of imperturbability of the kind that is a cure for nerves under fire. If the other fellow is not scared it does not do for you to be scared.
"Did you get any shells in your neighbourhood?" we asked the chauffeur—also British and imperturbable—whom we found waiting at a clearing station for wounded.
"Yes, sir, I saw several, but none hit the car."
As we came to the first cross-roads in that dead land back of the trenches which was still being shelled by shrapnel, though not another car was in sight, and ours had no business there (as we were told afterwards), that chauffeur, as he slowed up before turning, held out his hand from habit as he would have done in Piccadilly.
Two or three days later things were normal along the front again, with Mr. Atkins still stuffing himself with marmalade in that two hundred yards of trench.
XXIII
Winning And Losing
Seeming an immovable black line set as a frontier in peace, that Western front on your map which you bought early in the war in anticipation of rearranging the flags in keeping with each day's news was, in reality, a pulsating, changing line.