has not enough shells to
sow them broadcast over the whole battle area.

It is not an uncommon thing for one to feel quite safe within a couple
of hundred yards of an artillery concentration. That corner of a
village, that edge of a shattered grove, that turn in the highway, that
sunken road--keep away from them! Any kind of trench for shrapnel; lie
down flat unless a satisfactory dugout is near for protection from high
explosives which burst in the earth. If you are at the front and a
curtain of fire is put behind you, wait until it is over or go around
it. If there is one ahead, wait until another day--provided that you are
a spectator. Always bear in mind how unimportant you are, how small a
figure on the great field, and that if every shell fired had killed one
soldier there would not be an able-bodied man in uniform left alive on
the continent of Europe. By observing these simple rules you may see a
surprising amount with a chance of surviving.

One day I wanted to go into the old German dugouts under a formless pile
of ruins which a British colonel had made his battalion headquarters;
but I did not want to go enough to persist when I understood the
situation. Formerly, my idea of a good dugout--and I always like to be
within striking distance of one--was a cave twenty feet deep with a roof
of four or five layers of granite, rubble and timber; but now I feel
more safe if the fragments of a town hall are piled on top of this.

The Germans were putting a shell every minute with clockwork regularity
into the colonel's "happy home" and at intervals four shells in a salvo.
You had to make a run for it between the shells, and if you did not know
the exact location of the dugout you might have been hunting for it some
time. Runners bearing messages took their chances both going and coming
and two men were hit. The colonel was quite safe twenty feet underground
with the matting of debris including that of a fallen chimney overhead,
but he was a most unpopular host. The next day he moved his headquarters
and not having been considerate enough to inform the Germans of the fact
they kept on methodically pounding the roof of the untenanted premises.

After every battlefield "promenade" I was glad to step into the car
waiting at the "dead line," where the chauffeurs frequently had had
harder luck in being shelled than we had farther forward. Yet I know of
no worse place to be in than a car when you hear the first growing
scr