e dangers merely prospective.' They are actual and
grimly disgusting. During the past week the casualty list has gone on
rapidly increasing, and to-day our total is close on one hundred
killed and wounded in less than two weeks' intermittent fighting out
of a force of four hundred and fifty rifles. The shells occasionally
fly low and take you on the head; the bullets flick through loopholes
or as often take you in the back from some enfilading barricades, and
thus through two agencies you can be hastened towards the Unknown. As
far as I am personally concerned, it is largely a matter of food
whether this affects one acutely or not. If you have a full stomach
you do not mind so much, and even shrug your shoulders should the man
next to you be hit; but at four or five in the morning, when
everything is pale and damp, and you are stomach-sick, it is
nerve-shaking to see a man brutally struck and gasping under the blow.
I have seen this happen three times; once it was truly horrible, for I
was so splashed with blood....

It is also largely a matter of days. On some days, you think, in a
curious sort of a way, that your turn has come, and that it will be
all over in a few minutes. You try to convince yourself by silent
arguing that such thoughts are the merest foolishness, that you are at
heart a real coward; but in spite of every device the feeling remains,
and in place of your former unconcern a nervousness takes possession
of you. This nervousness is not exactly the nervousness of yourself,
for your outer self surveys your inner depths with some contempt, but
the slight fear remains. You do not know what it is--it is
inexplicable. Yet it is there.

Yesterday I had the experience in full force, just as a line of us in
extended order were galloping up to a threatened position. My boots
untied and twice nearly tripped me. I had to stop, perhaps two
seconds, perhaps five, dropping on my knee with my head low beside it.
For some reason I did not finish tying the laces. I sprang up, threw
my right leg forward preparatory to doubling, and then _ping_--I was
spinning on the ground, laughing at my own clumsiness in falling down.
Then I glanced to see why my right knee-cap stung me so much. I
stopped laughing. A bullet had split across the skin--_rafle_, the
French call it--and a shred of my trousers, mixed with some shreds of
skin, was hanging down covered with blood. Half a second before my
head had been exactly where my knee w