Two men are resting in a trench but not lying low enough. One is munching a biscuit, and the other is flicking small pebbles at him. A particularly sharp stone, as the man with the biscuit fancies, strikes him on the neck. He leaps round and demands indignantly, "Say, Bill, did you chuck that stone at me?" Bill denies the charge, and, perceiving the occasion for it, rejoins, "Why, mate, you're wounded." He had got a bullet and not a harmless pebble. Firing in battle is now carried on at such long distances that if one is in the neighbourhood at all he may not be able to keep out of it. This was once the case with me in China. A hail of bullets came round us and we did not know from whence it came. A man on the right of me fell and said, "I'm hit," and another on the left did the same. As no enemy was visible I thought that it was a grim joke until I saw blood spurting up. Writing in a letter of a second occasion on which he was wounded, a soldier said: "This makes twice their shrapnel has pipped me. If they do it again I shall say, 'I ain't going to play any more! You are too rough!'" Another man was hit in the right arm when drinking tea. He carefully transferred the pannikin to the left hand, and finished his tea! When a bullet got him an Irishman, exclaiming "The brutes have hit me," fired his rifle and said, "That's one back ter them." Then he got hit again and observed, "Be jabers, if they haven't struck me the second toime." A third hit was too much and he expostulated, "That's number three. The blackguards might leave a party alone after they've hit him wance." With a machine gun a Highlander at a bridge over the river Marne kept back a column of Germans until reliefs came up. When he fell dead and was carried away thirty bullet wounds were found on his body. It is strange to hear soldiers at home talking of soldiers who have gone to war, and have been wounded or died. They seldom express pity for them, nor do they feel much. And the want of what might seem a natural sensation is really very fine, for it is due to a conviction that a man has to do his duty, and that to die in the performance of it covers him with honour. Strange, too, is the way soldiers can joke when hit themselves, or when someone near them has "got it." In one of the Highland regiments there was a very fat pipe major. His legs were like barrels, and when he was shot in them he said, "Weel, I wonder they didna do that before." Two chums were discussing the relative values of their birthplaces. The Cockney was evidently having the best of the argument, when a shrapnel shell burst above them and the Londoner received a bullet in each leg, while the Birmingham man escaped unhurt. "I should think you'll give way now!" said the man from Birmingham. "Why?" asked the Cockney. "Well, you haven't a leg to stand on," was the reply.