Before that, at Drouville, Courbesseau, Cerceuil, Réméréville, Hoéville, Erbéviller, Champenoux (into which the guns on Amance poured shells at the rate of between 2500 and 3000 rounds a day for a fortnight), and other small hamlets round the forest, most of which, like Réméréville, _n’existent plus_, there had been a long series of hand-to-hand struggles and trench warfare, during which day and night the roar of the guns and the rattle of the mitrailleuses and rifles, was almost continuous. In the trenches the men got so used to the turmoil that though they slept through it peacefully in their off-moments, they missed it when it stopped. It was the sudden lulls and not the noise that they found startling. As a young officer who was wounded at Réméréville said to me one day when he was talking of the night on which he was knocked over, “The silence woke me.” “The shells,” wrote another, “keep falling all round, but there are so many that one takes no notice of them. Even the horses don’t move, which pretty well proves that there is nothing heroic in keeping cool.” In a way, of course, that is true enough. It is all, as he said, a matter of luck, and the less one thinks about getting hit the better, though the fact remains that men have imagination and horses have not, which does make a difference. But, imagination or no imagination, men who are used to fire certainly do become extraordinarily fearless and even contemptuous about its effect. I was talking one day—not in Lorraine, but on the Champagne front—to the commandant of a battery of 75’s, which were trying to put out of action a German machine gun about three miles off which was worrying the infantry in a particular trench in front. He pointed to the corner of a wood two or three hundred yards behind us round which were coming about twenty men, mounted and on foot. “They don’t seem to mind a bit,” he said, “about getting hit. They all know that the German gunners can see the rise at that corner and that they have got the range of it to a yard, and yet—now look,” he added quickly. A shell, three shells together, whistled over our heads. There was a roar, a column of brown smoke thirty feet high shot up into the air at the exposed corner, apparently right in the middle of the group. The horses bucked a little, and one of them screamed, but a second or two later the men on foot, who had thrown themselves flat on their faces when they heard the shells coming, got up and came slowly sauntering past us quietly smoking their pipes, and the commandant went on with his conversation—which was interrupted twice again in the next few minutes by exactly the same abrupt interlude. “Nothing can teach them,” he said. “They know that these big German shells have a way of bursting straight up and down instead of laterally, the corner is a short cut, and they prefer to take the risk. After all, the Boches may not shoot—and they don’t care.”