This kind of siege battle is very wearing to those engaged in it. The dogged courage, day and night, which it requires, seems to me every bit as splendid as those more striking deeds of gallantry for which men win the V.C. As a private wrote: “We don’t care tuppence for shrapnel, which flies back and hardly ever hits us. What worries us is that the Germans have been turning their heavy siege guns upon us. The shells they fire are no joke. They rip a hole in the ground big enough to bury an entire regiment. One man standing near me was hurled into the lower branches of a tree by the concussion. We got him down, and strange to say he was comparatively unhurt.” That makes one think of Sir Walter Scott’s lines: “Three hundred cannon-mouths roared loud, And from their throats with flash and cloud Their showers of iron threw.” It was early in the Battle of the Aisne that a British gunner, already slightly wounded, went on serving his gun, when suddenly down whizzed a shell and severely injured his leg. He picked himself up and calmly went on with his perilous job. The action was then very hot, and he refused to receive first aid. At last, when it became clear he could go on no longer, he was forced by his comrades to leave his post of duty and danger, but it took two of them to hold him down on the ambulance stretcher! The Russians have an excellent proverb, “The bullet is a fool, but the bayonet is a brave fellow.” The bullet, however, especially when shot by one of our British soldiers, is by no means a fool, as our enemies have again and again found to their cost. The German soldiers usually fired their rifles at random from the hip. But our men are trained to take aim steadily from the shoulder, and so not many British bullets are wasted. The modern bullet has a tremendous range. Before the Battle of Omdurman a wounded officer was placed at what was thought to be five thousand yards from the nearest point of fire. Yet a stray bullet traversed those three miles of desert, and striking him on the head killed him. One is glad to know that the latest type of bullet usually inflicts quite a small, clean wound, which heals up quickly. In old days it was thought that no one could survive being shot through the heart, but it has now been proved that a bullet may actually puncture the heart without doing any permanent harm.