Those who came out of the trenches quite "done up," Colonel Bate, Irish and genial, fatherly and not lean, claimed for his own. After the washing they lay on cots under a glass roof, and they might play dominoes and read the papers when they were well enough to sit up. They had the food which Colonel Bate knew was good for them, just as he knew what was deadly for the inhabitants whom they brought into that isolated room which every man must pass through before he was admitted to the full radiance of the colonel's curative smile. When they were able to return to the trenches, each was written down as one unit more in the colonel's weekly statistical reports. In summer he entertained al fresco in an open-air camp. XV In Neuve Chapelle Typical of many others, this quiet village in a flat country of rich farming land, with a church, a school, a post-office, and stores where the farmer could buy a pound of sugar or a spool of thread, employ a notary, or get a pair of shoes cobbled or a horse shod, without having to go to the neighbouring town of Bethune, Neuve Chapelle became famous only after it had ceased to exist--unless a village remains a village after it has been reduced to its original elements by shell-fire. It was the scene of one of those actions in the long siege line which have the dignity of a battle; the losses on either side, about sixteen thousand, were two-thirds of those at Waterloo or Gettysburg. Here the British after the long winter's stalemate in the mud, where they stuck when the exhausted Germans could press no farther, took the offensive, with the sap of spring rising in their veins. The guns blazed the way and the infantry charged in the path of the guns' destruction; and they kept on while the shield of shell-fire held. When it left an opening for the German machine-guns through its curtain and the German guns visited on the British what their guns had been visiting on the Germans, the British stopped. A lesson was learned; a principle established. A gain was made, if no goal were reached. The human stone wall had moved. It had broken some barriers and come to rest before others, again to become a stone wall. But it knew that the thing could be done with guns and shells enough--and only with enough. This means a good deal when you have been under dog for a long time. Months were to pass waiting for enough shells and guns, with many little actions and their steady drain of life, while everyone looked back to Neuve Chapelle as a landmark. It was something definite for a man to say that he had been wounded at Neuve Chapelle and quite indefinite to say that he had been wounded in the course of the day's work in the trenches. No one might see the battle in that sea of mud. He might as well have looked at the smoke of Vesuvius with an idea of learning what was going on inside of the crater. I make no further attempt at describing it. My view came after the battle was over and the cauldron was still steaming.