ctually when the rum ration
was issued.

Forty-eight hours later winter had disappeared. The sun was blazing
in a cloudless sky. Aeroplanes were battling for photographic rights
overhead; the brown earth beneath our feet was putting forth its
first blades of tender green. The muck-heap outside our rest-billet
displayed unmistakable signs of upheaval from its winter sleep.
Primroses appeared in Bunghole Wood; larks soared up into the sky
above No Man's Land, making music for the just and the unjust.
Snipers, smiling cheerfully over the improved atmospheric conditions,
polished up their telescopic sights. The artillery on each side hailed
the birth of yet another season of fruitfulness and natural
increase with some more than usually enthusiastic essays in mutual
extermination. Half the Mess caught colds in their heads.

Frankly, we are not sorry to see the end of winter. Caesar, when he
had concluded his summer campaign, went into winter quarters. Caesar,
as Colonel Kemp once huskily remarked, knew something!

Still, each man to his taste. Corporal Mucklewame, for one, greatly
prefers winter to summer.

"In the winter," he points out to Sergeant M'Snape, "a body can
breathe withoot swallowing a wheen bluebottles and bum-bees. A body
can aye streitch himself doon under a tree for a bit sleep withoot
getting wasps and wee beasties crawling up inside his kilt, and
puddocks craw-crawing in his ear! A body can keep himself frae
sweitin'--"

"He can that!" assents M'Snape, whose spare frame is more vulnerable
to the icy breeze than that of the stout corporal.

However, the balance of public opinion is against Mucklewame. Most
of us are unfeignedly glad to feel the warmth of the sun again.
That working-party, filling sandbags just behind the machine-gun
emplacement, are actually singing. Spring gets into the blood, even
in this stricken land. The Boche over the way resents our efforts at
harmony.

Sing us a song, a song of Bonnie Scotland!
Any old song will do.
By the old camp-fire, the rough-and-ready choir
Join in the chorus too.
"You'll tak' the high road and I'll tak' the low road"--
'Tis a song that we all know,
To bring back the days in Bonnie Scotland,
Where the heather and the bluebells--

_Whang_!

The Boche, a Wagnerian by birth and upbringing, cannot stand any more
of this, so he has fired a rifle-grenade at the glee-party--on the
whole a much more honest and direct method of c