The more bother in taking cover that the Germans can make the British, the better they like it; and the British return the compliment in kind. Everything that harasses your enemy is counted to the good. If every shell fired had killed a man in this war, there would be no soldiers left to fight on either side; yet never have shells been so important in war before. They can reach the burrowing human beings in shelters which are bullet-proof; they are the omnipresent threat of death. The firing of shells from batteries securely hidden and emplaced represents no cost of life to your side, only cost of material; which ridicules the foolish conclusion that machinery and not men count. It is because man is still the most precious machine--a machine that money cannot reproduce--that gun machinery is so much in favour, and every commander wants to use shells as freely as you use city water when you don’t pay for it by metre. Now another headquarters and another general, also isolated in a dugout, holding the reins of his wires over a section of line adjoining that of the one we had just left. Before we proceeded we must look over his shelter from shell-storms. The only time that these British generals become boastful is over their dugouts. They take all the pride in them of the man who has bought a plot of land and built himself a home; and like him, they keep on making improvements and calling attention to them. I must say that this was one of the best shelters I have seen anywhere in the tornado belt; and whatever I am not, I am certainly an expert in dugouts. Of course, this general, too, said, “At your own risk!” He was good enough to send a young officer with us up to the trenches; then we should not make any mistakes about direction if we wanted to reach the neighbourhood of the two hundred yards which we had taken from the Germans. When we thanked him and said “Good-bye!” he remarked: “We never say good-bye up here. It does not sound pleasant. Make it _au revoir_” And he, too, had a twinkle in his eye. By this time one leg ought to have been so much longer than the other that one would have walked in a circle if he had not had a guide. That battery which had been near the dugout kept on with its regular firing, its shells sweeping overhead. We had not gone far before we came to a board nailed to a tree with the caution, “Keep to the right!” If you went to the left you might be seen by the enemy, though we were seeing nothing of him, nor of our own trenches yet. Every square yard of this ground had been tried out by actual experience, at the cost of dead and wounded men, till safe lanes of approach had been found.