--men tell me--and reverent
about the dead. It's all gone now. There have been atrocities, gas,
unforgettable things. Everything is harder. Our people are inclined now
to laugh at a man who gets hit, and to be annoyed at a man with a
troublesome wound. The other day, they say, there was a big dead German
outside the Essex trenches. He became a nuisance, and he was dragged in
and taken behind the line and buried. After he was buried, a kindly soul
was putting a board over him with 'Somebody's Fritz' on it, when a shell
burst close by. It blew the man with the board a dozen yards and wounded
him, and it restored Fritz to the open air. He was lifted clean out. He
flew head over heels like a windmill. This was regarded as a tremendous
joke against the men who had been at the pains of burying him. For a
time nobody else would touch Fritz, who was now some yards behind his
original grave. Then as he got worse and worse he was buried again by
some devoted sanitarians, and this time the inscription was 'Somebody's
Fritz. R.I.P.' And as luck would have it, he was spun up again. In
pieces. The trench howled with laughter and cries of 'Good old Fritz!'
'This isn't the Resurrection, Fritz.'...

"Another thing that appeals to the sunny humour of the trenches as a
really delicious practical joke is the trick of the fuses. We have two
kinds of fuse, a slow-burning fuse such as is used for hand-grenades and
such-like things, a sort of yard-a-minute fuse, and a rapid fuse that
goes a hundred yards a second--for firing mines and so on. The latter is
carefully distinguished from the former by a conspicuous red thread.
Also, as you know, it is the habit of the enemy and ourselves when the
trenches are near enough, to enliven each other by the casting of homely
but effective hand-grenades made out of tins. When a grenade drops in a
British trench somebody seizes it instantly and throws it back. To hoist
the German with his own petard is particularly sweet to the British
mind. When a grenade drops into a German trench everybody runs. (At
least that is what I am told happens by the men from our trenches;
though possibly each side has its exceptions.) If the bomb explodes, it
explodes. If it doesn't, Hans and Fritz presently come creeping back to
see what has happened. Sometimes the fuse hasn't caught properly, it has
been thrown by a nervous man; or it hasn't burnt properly. Then Hans or
Fritz puts in a new fuse and sends it back with loving c