er
is particularly unpleasant, for the noise of the wind in the trees
makes it difficult to hear the shell approaching. Days of heavy rain
are the most desirable on the whole, for then the gunners are too
busy bailing out their gun-pits to worry their heads over adventurous
pedestrians. One learns, also, to mark down and avoid particular
danger-spots. For instance, the southeast corner of that wood, where
a reserve company are dug in, is visited by "Silent Susans" for about
five minutes each noontide: it is therefore advisable to select some
other hour for one's daily visit. (Silent Susan, by the way, is not a
desirable member of the sex. Owing to her intensely high velocity she
arrives overhead without a sound, and then bursts with a perfectly
stunning detonation and a shower of small shrapnel bullets.) There
is a fixed rifle-battery, too, which fires all day long, a shot at a
time, down the main street of the ruined and deserted village named
Vrjoozlehem, through which one must pass on the way to the front-line
trenches. Therefore in negotiating this delectable spot, one shapes
a laborious course through a series of back yards and garden-plots,
littered with broken furniture and brick rubble, allowing the
rifle-bullets the undisputed use of the street. The mention of
Vrjoozlehem--that is not its real name, but a simplified form of
it--brings to our notice the wholesale and whole-hearted fashion in
which the British Army has taken Belgian institutions under its wing.
Nomenclature, for instance. In France we make no attempt to interfere
with this: we content ourselves with devising a pronounceable
variation of the existing name. For example, if a road is called La
Rue de Bois, we simply call it "Roodiboys," and leave it at that.
On the same principle, Etaples is modified to "Eatables," and
Sailly-la-Bourse to "Sally Booze." But in Belgium more drastic
procedure is required. A Scotsman is accustomed to pronouncing
difficult names, but even he is unable to contend with words composed
almost entirely of the letters _j, z_, and _v_. So our resourceful
Ordnance Department has issued maps--admirable maps--upon which the
outstanding features of the landscape are marked in plain figures.
But instead of printing the original place-names, they put "Moated
Grange," or "Clapham Junction," or "Dead Dog Farm," which simplifies
matters beyond all possibility of error. (The system was once
responsible, though, for an unjust if unintent