I had seen the trenches by day; later I saw them by night. A tedious, slipping walk through half a mile of muddy, unroofed tunnels and I was in the front German line near Labasse. When I had accustomed myself to the steady cracking of rifles in the firing pits which I could not see, but which I knew must be close by; when I had nervously counted the bursting of twenty shells, all in an appalling few minutes, yet had heard no plop of fragments burying themselves into the mud above, I began to be able to look about me. By turning my indispensable electric torch this way and that, I could see in the rear wall of the trench a series of caves dug in the earth, their entrances so low that a man would have to enter them on hands and knees, and in some I saw the yellowish gutter of candles and others were pitch dark. At Unter Officer Ochsler's suggestion I went down into one of the caves. "Later," he said, "you won't want to be moving around much. It'll get hotter then and you'll want to remain in one place where you're sure the shelter is good." From one of the candle-lighted dugouts, I heard part singing, a lively air, doubtless from some German operetta, and above us shells whined and burst roaring in the fields. It was while we were walking thus, peering to right and left into the life of the catacombs of mud, that a stentorian cry behind us seemed to spin the Lieutenant round on his heels and I followed him thumping heavily back down the slippery pit. "It's an attack," he shouted over his shoulder. "Get into one of the dugouts and stay there. And, if they get us, wave your passport if they find you, and yell you're an American." Indicating one of the little passages towards the firing pits, he gave me a shove and spattered away to take command. Down on all fours I went. I wondered if the two soldiers in the pit saw me. Apparently not. Their shoulders were hunched to their guns. I hesitated. Of course the dugout would be the safest place, but shells had been flying over the trench for an hour now and nothing had happened; and their shriek and heavy boom no longer seemed so terrifying. But then the Lieutenant had strongly hinted about my being in the way. He had told me to get into that dugout and remain there. Was I not really under his orders? Strange things to be reasoning out with yourself, points of military etiquette, with the skies raining death and the whole line of the trenches blazing with a red, repelling flame. But war is strange, and now I wonder if in the firing line, cowardice and bravery do really exist; if it is not rather one man's nervous system responding to reckless hysteria quicker than another's?