The relationship between courage and discretion is always a difficult thing in war. Many lives have been lost, I fear, in this war because officers, particularly those new to the game, would not take cover when a shell came over, lest they might appear “rattled.” In point of fact, a man may often escape a wound, or perhaps even save his life, by taking refuge in a dug-out or seeking refuge behind a tree or a wall, when he hears by the diminishing speed of a shell that it is about to burst in his neighbourhood. A very few weeks in the field, however, makes most men fatalistic about shell-fire--a man sees so often that life and death hang on a fraction of a second, on a foot this way or that. Going up to trenches one afternoon with two companions in a particularly lively part of our line, we had to cross a little bridge over a ditch. Twenty yards from this bridge was a dug-out in which the headquarters of the battalion I had come to visit was situated. I had just reached the dug-out, when I heard the slow drone of a shell. As I turned towards the direction from which the sound came the shell burst square over the bridge we had crossed less than a minute before, and two other shells fell close by within a few seconds. With the utmost satisfaction, I must admit, I dwelt on the thought that, if I had delayed for a minute to fasten a boot-lace or to light a cigarette, I should in all probability have been on that bridge just when those three shells burst there. Two officers were following one another in cars through a ruined village close behind our lines. At the end of the village they were stopped by a military policeman, who warned them that the road was being shelled. The officer in the leading car decided that he would wait for the “strafing” to cease; the other, who was in a hurry, proceeded to his destination by another route. On arriving he found a telephone message to say that the first car had been struck square by a shell a few minutes after he had left, and that the officer and his chauffeur had been killed on the spot. The rivet that holds the regimental officers together, their common solicitude as their common pride, are the men. The officer in the trenches is thinking continually of the men, of their safety, of their comfort, of their health, of their behaviour under fire. Get an officer talking about a “show,” and he will never tire of telling you how well the men behaved, how Private This is a most “gallant feller,” and Private That, “my best bomber,” died. “The men did d---- well,” “The men were splendid.” How often have I heard phrases like these! Pride in their officers, pride in their regiment, flashes out quaintly in the men’s talk. Listen to a group of soldiers describing a fight.