There had been hint of gathering activity in the marching troops on the roads, and I knew that some kind of a skirmish was on from the scattering spatter of rifle-fire above and to my right; but that I had actually blundered in between the combatants was not evident until the staccato of a suddenly unmasked machine-gun broke out in the copse below. I did not hear the familiarly ingratiating swish of speeding bullets, and only an occasional twitching in the oak scrub told of a skirmishing soldier, but it was plain that if the rifles were firing in the direction of the machine-gun, and the machine-gun was firing in the direction of the rifles, the position of my shivering anatomy came pretty near to blocking a portion of the restricted little neck of atmosphere along which the interchanged pellets must make their way. One never learns it until he is under fire--especially rifle-fire--for the first time, but the faculty for taking cover, for making oneself inconspicuous at the approach of real or fancied danger, is one of the few things in which the more or less degenerate human of the present day suffers the least in comparison with that fine and self-sufficient animal, his primitive ancestor. I hurdled neatly over a natural “entanglement” of magenta-blossomed cactus, dived through a bosky tunnel in the gnarled oak scrub, and landed comfortably in the matted mass of soft maiden-hair where the water dripped from the side of a deep hole excavated by the village brick-makers in taking out clay. There was ample cover from anything but high-angle artillery fire on either side; so, picking out a bed of lush grass with a cornflower and buttercup pillow, I stretched in luxurious ease to let the battle blow over.