it as belonging to
its particular camp. It told of a man who believed that the place in
which we were was being continuously and severely shelled by the
Germans. He is reported to have said that war was not nearly so
dangerous a thing as people at home believed, for our casualties were
extraordinarily few. Indeed, there were no casualties at all, and the
shelling to which he supposed himself to be subjected was the most
futile thing imaginable.

A major, a draft-conducting officer, who happened to be with us one
day when this story was told, improved on it boldly.

"As we marched in from the steamer to-day," he said, "we passed a
large field on the right of the road about a mile outside the
camp--perhaps you know it?"

"Barbed wire fence across the bottom of it," I said, "and then a
ditch."

"Exactly," said the major. "Well, one of the N.C.O.'s in my draft,
quite an intelligent man, asked me whether that was the firing line
and whether the ditch was the enemy's trench. He really thought the
Germans were there, a hundred yards from the road we were marching
along."

I daresay the original story was true enough. Even the major's
improved version of it may conceivably have been true. The ordinary
private, and indeed the ordinary officer, when he first lands in
France, has the very vaguest idea of the geography of the country or
the exact position of the place in which he finds himself. For all he
knows he may be within a mile or two of Ypres. And we certainly lived
in that camp with the sounds of war in our ears. We had quite near us
a----Perhaps even now I had better not say what the establishment
was; but there was a great deal of business done with shells, and
guns of various sizes were fired all day long. In the camp we heard
the explosions of the guns. By going a very little way outside the
camp we could hear the whine of the shells as they flew through the
air. We could see them burst near various targets on a stretch of
waste marshy ground.

No one could fail to be aware that shells were being fired in his
immediate neighbourhood. It was not unnatural for a man to suppose
that they were being fired at him. From early morning until dusk
squads of men were shooting, singly or in volleys, on two ranges. The
crackling noise of rifle fire seldom died wholly away. By climbing
the hill on which M. lived, we came close to the schools of the
machine gunners, and could listen to the stuttering of their infernal
inst