at is the first degree. You might call this the second."

It was heavy enough to keep any writer from being bored. The
second degree will do. We will leave the first until another time.

Later, when we were walking along a paved road, I heard again what
seemed the siren call of a nine-inch.

Once, in another war, I had been on a paved road when--well, I did
not care to be on this one if a nine-inch hit it and turned fragments of
paving-stones into projectiles. An effort to "run out the bunt"--Caesar's
ghost! It was one of our own shells! Nerves! Shame! Two stretcher-
bearers with a wounded man looked up in surprise, wondering what
kind of a hide-and-seek game we were playing. They made a picture
of imperturbability of the kind that is a cure for nerves under fire.
If the other fellow is not scared it does not do for you to be scared.

"Did you get any shells in your neighbourhood?" we asked the
chauffeur--also British and imperturbable--whom we found waiting at
a clearing station for wounded.

"Yes, sir, I saw several, but none hit the car."

As we came to the first cross-roads in that dead land back of the
trenches which was still being shelled by shrapnel, though not
another car was in sight, and ours had no business there (as we were
told afterwards), that chauffeur, as he slowed up before turning, held
out his hand from habit as he would have done in Piccadilly.

Two or three days later things were normal along the front again, with
Mr. Atkins still stuffing himself with marmalade in that two hundred
yards of trench.

XXIII
Winning And Losing

Seeming an immovable black line set as a frontier in peace, that
Western front on your map which you bought early in the war in
anticipation of rearranging the flags in keeping with each day's news
was, in reality, a pulsating, changing line.

At times you thought of it as an enormous rope under the constant
pressure of soldiers on either side, who now and then, with an "all
together" of a tug-of-war at a given point, straightened or made a
bend, with the result imperceptible except as you measured it by a
tree or a house. Battles as severe as the most important in South
Africa, battles severe enough to have decided famous campaigns in
Europe in former days, when one king rode forth against another,
became landmark incidents of the give and take, the wrangling and
the wrestling of siege operations.

The sensation of victory or defeat for those engaged w