always from
a safe position behind the parapet which the adversaries squint
across through their periscopes. At the gibe business the German is,
perhaps, better than the Briton.

Early in the evening a regiment on our right broke into a busy
fusillade at some fancied movement of the enemy. In trench talk that
is getting "jumpy." The Germans in front roared out their contempt in
a chorus of guying laughter. Toward morning, these same Germans
also became "jumpy" and began tearing the air with bullets, firing
against nothing but the blackness of night. Tommy Atkins only made
some characteristic comments; for he is a quiet fellow, except when
he is played on the music-hall stage. Possibly he feels the
inconsistency of laughter when you are killing human beings; for, as
his officers say, he is temperamental and never goes to the trouble of
analysing his emotions. A very real person and a good deal of a
philosopher is Mr. Atkins, Britain's professional fighting man, who was
the only kind of fighting man she had ready for the war.

Any small boy who had never had enough fireworks in his life might
be given a job in the German trenches, with the privilege of firing
flares till he fell asleep from exhaustion. All night they were going, with
the regularity of clockwork. The only ones sent up from our side that
night were shot in order that I might get a better view of the German
dead.

You know how water lies in the low places on the ground after a
heavy rain. Well, the patches of dead were like that, and dark in the
spots where they were very thick--dark as with the darkness of
deeper water. There were also irregular tongues of dead and
scattered dead, with arms outstretched or under them as they fell,
and faces white even in the reddish glare of the rockets and turned
toward you in the charge that failed under the withering blasts of
machine-guns, ripping out two or three hundred shots a minute, and
well-aimed rifle-bullets, each bullet getting its man. Threatening that
charge would have seemed to a recruit, but measured and calculated
in certainty of failure in the minds of veteran defenders, who knew
that the wheat could not stand before their mowers. Man's flesh is
soft and a bullet is hard and travels fast.

One bit of satire which Tommy sent across the field covered with its
burden of slaughter to the Germans who are given to song, ought to
have gone home. It was: "Why don't you stop singing and bury your
dead?" But