he earth. Besides, someone must be in the
house when it is hit if there are to be any casualties; and it is
quite possible that a single person present might be dug out of the
debris unharmed. Vulnerable as man's flesh is, he remains a pretty
small object on the landscape. If he knows that his house is in
danger of being struck he then either goes into the cellar at the
first alarm, after having covered his floor with sandbags, or he may
take to a dugout in his yard.

When one has seen ten 15-inch shells strike a town of 25,000
inhabitants in a busy hour of the day and only half a dozen persons
killed and injured, he may learn a contempt for shell fire which,
however, is promptly turned into a tragic respect when one of the
same sort of shells strikes in a stone-paved courtyard where a
hundred soldiers are at their evening meal, and two-thirds of them
are killed and wounded.

The bursting of a shrapnel shell and its spray of low-velocity
bullets is also theoretically most destructive, but a roof of 6-inch
boards will furnish perfect protection from the bullets. Mother
Earth remains the best protection there is from fire. No rifle
bullet can penetrate through a 3-foot thickness of sandbags. A 6 or
8-inch high-explosive shell, which is the largest caliber
practicable for trench warfare, may burst near a double layer of
bags of stone rubble without hurting anyone in a cellar 30 feet
underneath. The rain of shrapnel bullets which mows the barbed wire
in front of a trench, as hail mows ripening grain, will not reach a
single man in the trench to the rear, if he keeps his head down.

At first thought it seems utterly inconsistent when bullets carry
effectively a mile and a half, and guns carry twenty miles, that
infantry should be fighting so close that they can throw bombs at each
other from distances of 15 and 20 yards. The very destructiveness of
modern weapons has contributed toward this result.

There has never been anything like so many guns used in battle, and
never have they been capable of such rapid fire. The field gun can
fire consistently eight or ten shots a minute, thanks to its modern
recoil cylinder and to the steadiness of aim, and literally
establish a "curtain of fire" with its torrent of bullets shot down
from the air and the cataracts of earth shot up by the bursting of
high-explosive shells in the ground, which no infantry can pass.

A machine gun behind a shield firing 500 shots a minute is
pract