From these mortifications the men in the firing trench, and the gunners who had endured the sharper torment of not being able to help them, were saved by the women, whom Mr. Bone shows us working at home, arming their knights for battle in a sense more valid than any known to Froissart or Malory. There came a time, most moving and memorable to all who were then in our trenches, when any German attempt to gall them began to evoke new, heart-warming sounds. All the upper air, over the place where the pelted sentries were crouching, seemed to have come to life on our side. At last our own trench mortars were answering, not in a few grudged monosyllables, but volubly, out of the fulness of the dump. Higher up also, there rose arch over arch, as it were, of audible, reassuring protection--first the low-pitched bridges of sound traced by the whizz of our field guns, and then the vast rainbow curve of our heavier shells making wing, high over head, with a more august, leisurely waft that sounded divinely. It was a changed and cheered world to be living in. We had the upper hand now, and every woman turning a shell or driving a crane in England had helped us to have it. We have it now still more securely. Since that time we have learnt the technique of attack--how to keep what we take and how to take what we want at no more than it need cost in lives. We have won, in hard fight, the best of all posts of observation--the sky, so that during the great engagements last year on the Somme there was not a German aeroplane to be seen in the air while ours were ranging everywhere over the battlefield, each with its eyes on the enemy’s lines and its voice at the ear of our guns. Our men and the gunners have now crossed bayonets so often that all the old awe in which Europe held the men of Sedan and Sadowa is gone; boys from Wiltshire and Worcestershire farms, recruits of a few months before, have chased Prussian guardsmen uphill out of their trenches and then held these ruined defences against all that those picked products of intensive military culture could do to regain them.