al,
Mueller!" Our men listened intently, and an acquaintance with German, so
imperfect as to be almost negligible, could not long disguise from them
the fact that their Saxon neighbours possessed a funny man whose name
was Mueller. Their interest in Mueller, always audible but never visible,
grew almost painful. At last they could restrain it no longer. At a
given signal they began chanting, like the gallery in a London theatre,
except that their voices came from the pit:

We--want--Mueller! We--want--Mueller! We--want--Mueller!

The refrain grew more and more insistent. At last a head appeared above
the German parapet. It rose gradually, as though the owner were being
hoisted by unseen hands. He rose, as the principal character in a Punch
and Judy show rises, with jerky articulations of his members from the
ventriloquial depths below. The body followed, until a three-quarter
posture was attained. The owner, with his hand upon his heart, bowed
gracefully three times and then disappeared. It was Mueller!

It is some months since I was in the British trenches,[28] and I often
wonder how our men have accommodated themselves to the ever-increasing
multiplication of the apparatus of war. The fire trenches I visited were
about wide enough to allow two men to pass one another--and that was
all. Obviously the wider your trench the greater your exposure to the
effects of shell-fire, and if we go on introducing trench-mortars, and
gas-pumps, and gas-extinguishers, to say nothing of a great store of
bombs, as pleasing in variety and as startling in their effects as
Christmas crackers, our trenches will soon be as full of furniture as a
Welsh miner's parlour. But doubtless the sappers have arranged all that.
Some of these improvements are viewed by company officers without
enthusiasm. The trench-mortar, for example, is distinctly unpopular, for
it draws the enemy's fire, besides being an uncanny thing to handle,
although the handling is done not by the company but by a "battery" of
R.G.A. men, who come down and select a "pitch." I have seen a
trench-mortar in action--it is like a baby howitzer, and makes a
prodigious noise. Our own men deprecate it and the enemy resent it. It
is an invidious thing. The gas-extinguisher is less objectionable, and,
incidentally, less exacting in the matter of accommodation. It is a
large copper vessel resembling nothing so much as the fire-extinguishing
cylinders one sees in public buildin