the warm shots of the charge. It was a many-facetted ball,
beautifully made, and calculated to produce the maximum wound.
This was the last shell to fall. We were safe. But we realised once
again, and more profoundly, that there is nothing casual in the
conduct of war.

At no place was the continuously intense character of the struggle--
like that of two leviathan wrestlers ever straining their hardest at
grips--more effectually brought home to me than in the region
known now familiarly to the whole world as Notre Dame de Lorette,
from the little chapel that stood on one part of it. An exceedingly ugly
little chapel it was, according to the picture postcards. There are
thousands of widows and orphans wearing black and regretting the
past and trembling about the future to-day simply because the
invaders had to be made to give up that religious edifice which they
had turned to other uses.

The high, thickly wooded land behind the front was very elaborately
organised for living either above ground or underground, according
to the circumstances of the day. To describe the organisation would
be impolitic. But it included every dodge. And the stores, entombed
in safety, comprised all things. I remember, for example, stacks of
hundreds of lamp-chimneys. Naught lacked to the completeness of
the scene of war. There were even prisoners. I saw two young
Germans under guard in a cabin. They said that they had got lost in
the labyrinth of trenches, and taken a wrong turning. And I believe
they had. One was a Red Cross man--probably a medical student
before, with wine and song and boastings, he joined his Gott, his
Kaiser, and his comrades in the great mission of civilisation across
Belgium. He was dusty and tired, and he looked gloomily at the
earthen floor of the cabin. Nevertheless, he had a good carriage
and a passably intelligent face, and he was rather handsome. I
sympathised with this youth, and I do not think that he was glad to
be a prisoner. Some people can go and stare at prisoners, and
wreak an idle curiosity upon them. I cannot. A glance, rather
surreptitious, and I must walk away. Their humiliation humiliates me,
even be they Prussians of the most offensive variety.

A little later we saw another prisoner being brought in--a miserable,
tuberculous youth with a nervous trick of the face, thin, very dirty,
enfeebled, worn out; his uniform torn, stained, bullet-pierced, and
threadbare. Somebody had given him a large hu