Conditions more calculated to shatter the strongest “nerves” it would be hard to imagine. Days and nights spent in wet, insanitary trenches, clothes swarming with vermin, food never very appetizing and often insufficient in amount, death or mutilation always imminent, comrades falling and fallen around, the groans of the wounded mingled with the ear-splitting din of bursting shells, to say nothing of the unspeakable horrors of the bayonet – all this, one would think, would more than suffice to upset the equilibrium of the most stable nervous system.