overhead and an explosion just in front made it plain to me that we
were to suffer for a moment's indiscretion, I felt neither fatigue nor
hunger. The searching shells fell nearer to us. We ran in couples,
with a fair distance between each couple, according to instructions,
along the rough, sinuous inequalities of the deep trench. After each
visitation we had to lie still and count five till all the fragments of
shell had come to rest. At last a shell seemed to drop right upon me.
The earth shook under me. My eyes and nose were affected by the
fumes of the explosion. But the shell had not dropped right upon
me. It had dropped a few yards to the left. A trench is a wonderful
contrivance. Immediately afterwards, a friend picked up in the trench
one of the warm shots of the charge. It was a many-facetted ball,
beautifully made, and calculated to produce the maximum wound.
This was the last shell to fall. We were safe. But we realised once
again, and more profoundly, that there is nothing casual in the
conduct of war.

At no place was the continuously intense character of the struggle--
like that of two leviathan wrestlers ever straining their hardest at
grips--more effectually brought home to me than in the region
known now familiarly to the whole world as Notre Dame de Lorette,
from the little chapel that stood on one part of it. An exceedingly ugly
little chapel it was, according to the picture postcards. There are
thousands of widows and orphans wearing black and regretting the
past and trembling about the future to-day simply because the
invaders had to be made to give up that religious edifice which they
had turned to other uses.

The high, thickly wooded land behind the front was very elaborately
organised for living either above ground or underground, according