They trained themselves to an intense egotism within narrow boundaries. Fifty yards to the left, or five hundred, men were being pounded to death by shell-fire. Fifty yards to the right, or five hundred, men were being mowed down by machine-gun fire. For the time being their particular patch was quiet. It was their luck. Why worry about the other fellow? The length of a traverse in a ditch called a trench might make all the difference between heaven and hell. Dead bodies were being piled up on one side of the traverse. A shell had smashed into the platoon next door. There was a nasty mess. Men sat under their own mud-bank and scooped out a tin of bully beef and hoped nothing would scoop them out of their bit of earth. This protective egotism seemed to me the instinctive soul-armor of men in dangerous places when I saw them in the line. In a little way, not as a soldier, but as a correspondent, taking only a thousandth part of the risks of fighting-men, I found myself using this self-complacency. They were strafing on the left. Shells were pitching on the right. Very nasty for the men in either of those places. Poor devils! But meanwhile I was on a safe patch, it seemed. Thank Heaven for that! “Here,” said an elderly officer--one of those rare exalted souls who thought that death was a little thing to give for one's country's sake--“here we may be killed at any moment!” He spoke the words in Contalmaison with a glow in his voice, as though announcing glad tidings to a friend who was a war artist camouflaged as a lieutenant and new to the scene of battle. “But,” said the soldier-artist, adjusting his steel hat nervously, “I don't want to be killed! I hate the idea of it!”