second
with slight loss. A young officer after being wounded had crawled into a
shell-crater, drawn his rubber sheet over him and so had died
peacefully, the clot of his life's blood on the earth beside him.

In the field of ruins around Fricourt a mighty crater of one of the
mines exploded on July 1st at the hour of attack was large enough to
hold a battalion. Germans had gone aloft in a spatter with its vast
plume of smoke and dust scooped from the bowels of the earth. Famous
since to sightseers of war were the dugouts around Fricourt which were
the last word in German provision against attack. The making of dugouts
is standardized like everything else in this war. There is the same
angle of entrance, the same flight of steps to that underground refuge,
in keeping with the established pattern. Depth, capacity and comfort are
the result of local initiative and industry. There may be beds and
tables and tiers of bunks. Many such chambers were as undisturbed as if
never a shell had burst in the neighborhood. The Germans in occupation
had been told to hold on; a counter-attack would relieve them. The faith
of some of them endured so well that they had to be blasted out by
explosives before they would surrender.

There was reassurance in the proximity of such good dugouts when
habitable to a correspondent if shells began to fall, as well as
protection for the British in reserve. Some whence came foul odors were
closed by the British as the simplest form of burial for the dead within
who had waited for bombs to be thrown before surrendering. For the
method of taking a dugout had long since become as standardized as its
construction. The men inside could have their choice from the Briton at
the entrance.

"Either file out or take what we send," as a soldier put it. "We can't
leave you there to come out and fire into our backs, as the Kaiser told
you to do, when we've started on ahead."

You could follow for miles the ruins of the first line, picking your way
among German dead in all attitudes, while a hand or a head or a foot
stuck out of the shell-hammered chalk mixed with flesh and fragments of
clothing, the thing growing nauseatingly horrible and your wonder
increasing as to how gunfire had accomplished the destruction and how
men had been able to conquer the remains that the shells had left. It
was a prodigious feat, emphasizing again the importance of the months of
preparation.

And the litter over the whole field