they are usually called "snipers." But, unlike snipers, they are not
entitled to be treated as prisoners of war (their habits partake too
much of espionage), and when captured they receive a short shrift from
an impassive man with a hot iron in the asbestos drying-room.

But it may well happen that in spite of babies, and baths, and brass
bands, and footballs, and boxing-gloves, and playing marbles (the
General in command of one of our divisions told me he had seen six
Argyll and Sutherland sergeants playing marbles with shrapnel bullets in
some support trenches), the men get bored. They are often very crowded,
and crowding may develop fastidious animosities. A man may tolerate
shrapnel in the trenches with equanimity, and yet may find his
neighbour's table-manners in billets positively intolerable. Men may
become "stale" or get on each other's nerves. When a company commander
sees signs of this, he has one very potent prescription; he prescribes a
good stiff route march. It has never been known to fail. Many a time in
the winter months, when out visiting Divisional Headquarters, did I, in
the shameful luxury of my car, come across a battalion slogging along
ruddy and cheerful in the mud, and singing with almost reproachful
unction:

Last night I s-s-aw you, I s-saw you, you naughty boy!

Some one ought to make an anthology (for private circulation only) of
the songs most affected by our men, and also of the topographical
Limericks with which they beguile the long hours in the trenches. And if
the English soldier is addicted to versifying it may be pleaded in his
behalf that, as Mommsen apologetically remarks of Caesar, "they were
weak verses." Not always, however, I have seen some unpublished verses
by a young officer on the staff of the late General Hubert Hamilton, a
man beloved by all who knew him, describing the burial of his dead chief
at night behind the firing-line, which in their sombre and elegiac
beauty are not unworthy to rank with the classical lines on the burial
of Sir John Moore. And there is that magnificent _Hymn before Battle_ by
Captain Julian Grenfell, surely one of the most moving things of its
kind.

With such diversions do our men beguile the interminable hours. After
all it is the small things that men resent in life, not the big ones. I
once asked a French soldier over a game of cards--in civil life he was a
plumber, whom we shall meet again[7]--whether he could get any sleep in
t