eam which indicates that yours is the neighborhood selected by a
German battery or two for expending some of its ammunition. When you are
in danger you like to be on your feet and to possess every one of your
faculties. I used to put cotton in my ears when I walked through the
area of the gun positions as some protection to the eardrums from the
blasts, but always took it out once I was beyond the big calibers, as
an acute hearing after some experience gave you instant warning of any
"krump" or five-point-nine coming in your direction, advising you which
way to dodge and also saving you from unnecessarily running for a dugout
if the shell were passing well overhead or short.

I was glad, too, when the car left the field quite behind and was over
the hills in peaceful country. But one never knew. Fifteen miles from
the front line was not always safe. Once when a sudden outburst of
fifteen-inch naval shells sent the people of a town to cover and
scattered fragments over the square, one cut open the back of the
chauffeur's head just as we were getting into our car.

"Are you going out to be strafed at?" became an inquiry in the mess on
the order of "Are you going to take an afternoon off for golf to-day?"
The only time I felt that I could claim any advantage in phlegm over my
comrades was when I slept through two hours of aerial bombing with
anti-aircraft guns busy in the neighborhood, which, as I explained, was
no more remarkable than sleeping in a hotel at home with flat-wheeled
surface cars and motor horns screeching under your window. A subway
employee or a traffic policeman in New York ought never to suffer from
shell-shock if he goes to war.

The account of personal risk which in other wars might make a magazine
article or a book chapter, once you sat down to write it, melted away as
your ego was reduced to its proper place in cosmos. Individuals had
never been so obscurely atomic. With hundreds of thousands fighting,
personal experience was valuable only as it expressed that of the whole.
Each story brought back to the mess was much like others, thrilling for
the narrator and repetition for the polite listener, except it was some
officer fresh from the communication trench who brought news of what was
going on in that day's work.

Thus, the battle had become static; its incidents of a kind like the
product of some mighty mill. The public, falsely expecting that the line
would be broken, wanted symbols of victory