y minutes to the left." Then the shells sing
over their heads with a pretty low trajectory, and the Huns, beginning
to get annoyed, reply with their heavy guns. There is a low whistle up
aloft, a noise like the fluttering of invisible wings, and the next
moment a cloud of black smoke rises over the village of X---- Y----,
behind the trenches. The Smoke Prevention Society ought to turn their
attention to "Jack Johnsons"; their habits are positively filthy.

These things, however, disturbed them but little and bored them a great
deal. So they set to work to make their particular rabbit-warren into a
Garden City. They held it on a repairing lease, and were constantly
filling sand-bags, but that was merely to prevent depreciation, and
didn't count. They first of all paved their trenches with bricks; there
was no difficulty about the supply, as the "Jack Johnsons" obligingly
acted as house-breakers in the village behind our lines, and bricks
could be had for the fetching. Then the orderly transplanted some
pansies and forget-me-nots from the garden of a ruined house, and made a
border in front of the company commander's dug-out. The communication
trench had been carried across a stream with some planks, and one day a
man with a gift for carpentry fixed up a balustrade out of the arms of
an apple-tree, which had been lopped off by shell, and we had a rustic
bridge. When May came, water anemones opened their star-like petals on
the surface of the clear amber stream, the orchard through which the
communication trench had been cut burst into blossom, the sticky clay
walls of the trench became hard as masonry in the sun, and one morning a
board appeared with the legend "Hyde Park. Keep off the grass."

With these amenities their manners grew more and more refined. I have
read somewhere, in one of those dull collections of sweeping
generalisations that are called sociology, that each species of the
_genus homo_ has to go through a normal sequence of stages from
barbarism to civilisation, and that we were once what the South Sea
Islanders are now. Which may be very true, but as regards that
particular primitive community I can testify that their social evolution
has in three months gone through all the stages that occupy other
communities three thousand years. They began as cave-dwellers and they
end by occupying suburban villas--the captain's dug-out has a roof of
corrugated iron, a window, a book-shelf, a table, and even chairs,