Not so! Huddled in these holes in the earth are free-born men of an old civilisation, who read the daily papers and eat jam on their bread. They do not want to be there, but they would not consider themselves worthy of the inheritance of free-born men if they were not. Only civilised man is capable of such stoicism as theirs. They have reverted to the cave-dweller’s protection because their civilisation is so highly developed that they can throw a piece of steel weighing anywhere from eighteen to two thousand pounds anywhere from five to twenty miles with merciless accuracy, and because the flesh of man is even more tender than in the cave-dweller’s time, not to mention that his brain-case is a larger target. An officer calls our attention to a shell-proof shelter with the civic pride of a member of a Chamber of Commerce pointing out the new Union Station. “Not even a high explosive”--the kind that bursts on impact after penetration--“could get into that!” he says. “We make them for generals and colonels and those who have precious heads on their shoulders.” With material and labour, the same might have been constructed for the soldiers; which brings us back to the question of munitions in the economic balance against a human life. It was the first shelter of this kind which I had seen. One never goes up to the trenches without seeing something new. The defensive is tireless in its ingenuity in saving lives and the offensive in taking them. Safeguards and salvage compete with destruction. And what labour all that excavation and construction represented--the cumulative labour of months and day-by-day repairs of the damage done by shells. After a bombardment, dig out the filled trenches and renew the smashed dugouts to be ready for another go! The walls of that communication trench were two feet above our heads. We noticed that all the men were in their dugouts; none were walking about in the open. One knew the meaning of this barometer--stormy. The German gunners were “strafing quite lively” this afternoon.