Up to date, however, we have not by any means drunk deep of warlike experience, for the good reason that the authorities are breaking us in by degrees. We are now in trenches, holding what is described as a quiet sector of the Line, recently taken over from the French, and hitherto very lightly held. For the past two years, the Intelligence people tell us, the trenches opposite have been manned by only one German to every four yards of front. Eddie Gillette has already announced that when he has finished doing what he came out here to do the number of Germans opposite may be the same, but the method of distribution will be different. “Not one Dutchman to four yards,” he explains, “but a quarter of a Dutchman to every one yard. Yes, _sir_!” Every Army has its own system of conducting trench warfare, founded largely upon national characteristics. The Germans, it used to be said, hold their trenches with machine guns, the British with men, the French with artillery. Certainly in nineteen-fifteen, when stationary warfare was the order of the day upon the Western Front, the Germans kept few men in the front trenches—except perhaps at night—leaving the line very much to the protection of barbed wire and machine guns, the latter laid and trained in such a fashion as to create if need be a continuous and impenetrable horizontal lattice-work of bullets in front of every section of the line. The British, having at that time more men than munitions—a battalion was lucky if it possessed four Vickers guns and a single trench-mortar—filled their trenches with as many defenders as they would hold, and trusted, not altogether vainly, to the old British tradition of rapid rifle fire and close work with the bayonet to keep the line intact. The French temperament called for more elasticity than this. The one thing a Frenchman hates to do in warfare is keep still. He prefers active counter-measures to dogged resistance. So in nineteen-fifteen, whenever a sector of the French trenches was heavily bombarded, the garrison was promptly withdrawn to a position of comparative safety—where, the story goes, they seized the opportunity to cook an extra-elaborate dinner. If the Germans followed up their bombardment with an infantry attack, that attack was met mainly with an intensive barrage from that amazingly rapid and accurate piece of scrap-iron, the _soixante-quinze_ field gun. When the German attack fizzled out, as it usually did, the incident ended, and the French infantry returned to their place in the line. But if it penetrated the barrage and occupied the French trenches, the Frenchman finished his coffee, adjusted Rosalie, his bayonet, and prized Brother Boche out of his new quarters.