se shells as freely
as you use city water when you do not pay for it by meter.

Now another headquarters and another general, also isolated in a
dug-out, holding the reins of his wires over a section of line adjoining
the section we had just left. Before we proceeded we must look over
his shelter from shell-storms. The only time that British generals
become boastful is over their dug-outs. They take all the pride in
them of the man who has bought a plot of land and built himself a
home; and, like him, they keep on making improvements and calling
attention to them. I must say that this was one of the best shelters I
have seen anywhere in the tornado belt; and whatever I am not, I am
certainly an expert in dug-outs. Of course, this general, too, said, "At
your own risk!" He was good enough to send a young officer with us
up to the trenches; then we should not make any mistakes about
direction if we wanted to reach the neighbourhood of the two hundred
yards which we had taken from the Germans. When we thanked him
and said "Good-bye!" he remarked:

"We never say good-bye up here. It does not sound pleasant. Make it
au revoir." He, too, had a twinkle in his eye.

By this time, one leg ought to have been so much longer than the
other that one would have walked in a circle if he had not had a
guide.

That battery which had been near the dug-out kept on with its regular
firing, its shells sweeping overhead. We had not gone far before we
came to a board nailed to a tree, with the caution, "Keep to the right!"
If you went to the left you might be seen by the enemy, though we
were seeing nothing of him, nor of our own trenches yet. Every
square yard of this ground had been tested by actual experience, at
the cost of dead and wounded men, till safe lanes of approach had
been found.

Next was a clearing station, where the wounded are brought in from
the trenches for transfer to ambulances. A glance at the burden on a
stretcher just arrived automatically framed the word, "Shell-fire!" The
stains over-running on tanned skin beyond the edge of the white
bandage were bright in the sunlight. A khaki blouse torn open, or a
trousers leg or a sleeve cut down the seam, revealing the white of the
first aid and a splash of red, means one man wounded; and by the
ones the thousands come.

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 els