notion of
humour."

"If it were a German flag?" I suggested.

"What hopes! We'd make it into a lace curtain!"

Even the guns had ceased firing. The birds in their evensong had all
the war to themselves. It was difficult to believe that if you stood on
top of the parapet anybody would shoot at you; no, not even if you
walked down the road that ran through the wheatfield, everything was
so peaceful. One grew sceptical of there being any Germans in the
trenches opposite.

"There are three or four sharpshooters and a fat old Boche professor
in spectacles, who moves a machine-gun up and down for a bluff,"
said a soldier, and another corrected him:

"No, the old professor's the one that walks along at night sending up
flares!"

"Munching K.K. bread with his false teeth!"

"And singing the hymn of hate!"

Thus the talk ran on in the quiet of evening, till we heard a concussion
and a quarter of a mile away, behind a screen of trees, a pillar of
smoke rose to the height of two or three hundred feet.

"A mine!" In front of the -th brigade!"

"Ours or the Boches'?"

"Ours, from the way the smoke went--our fuse!"

"No, theirs!"

Our colonel telephoned down to know if we knew whose mine it was,
which was the question we wanted to ask him. The guns from both
sides became busy under the column of smoke. Oh, yes, there were
Germans in the trenches which had appeared vacant. Their shots
and ours merged in the hissing medley of a tempest.

"Not enough guns--not enough noise for an attack!" said experienced
Tommy, who knew what an attack was like.

The commander of the adjoining brigade telephoned to the division
commander, who passed the word through to our colonel, who
passed it to us that the mine was German and had burst thirty yards
short of the British trench.

"After all that digging, wasting Boche powder in that fashion! The
Kaiser won't like it!" said Mr. Atkins. "We exploded one under them
yesterday and it made them hate so hard they couldn't wait. They've
awful tempers, the Boches!" And he finished the job on which he was
engaged when interrupted, eating a large piece of ration bread
surmounted by all the ration jam it could hold; while one of the
company officers reminded me that it was about dinner time.

"What do you think I am? A blooming traffic policeman?" growled the
cook to two soldiers who had found themselves in a blind alley in the
maze of streets back of the firing-trench. "My word! Is H