ous swarm, only to settle again when the victim
becomes quiescent. To these, high-explosives are a welcome relief.

The trenches themselves are no garden city, like those at Armentieres.
They were sited and dug in the dark, not many weeks ago, to secure two
hundred yards of French territory recovered from the Bosche by bomb
and bayonet. (The captured trench lies behind us now, and serves as
our second line.) They are muddy--you come to water at three feet--and
at one end, owing to their concave formation, are open to enfilade.
The parapet in many places is too low. If you make it higher with
sandbags you offer the enemy a comfortable target: if you deepen
the trench you turn it into a running stream. Therefore long-legged
subalterns crawl painfully past these danger-spots on all-fours,
envying Little Tich.

Then there is Zacchaeus. We call him by this name because he lives up
a tree. There is a row of pollarded willows standing parallel to our
front, a hundred and fifty yards away. Up, or in, one of these lives
Zacchaeus. We have never seen him, but we know he is there; because if
you look over the top of the parapet he shoots you through the head.
We do not even know which of the trees he lives in. There are nine
of them, and every morning we comb them out, one by one, with a
machine-gun. But all in vain. Zacchaeus merely crawls away into the
standing corn behind his trees, and waits till we have finished. Then
he comes back and tries to shoot the machine-gun officer. He has not
succeeded yet, but he sticks to his task with gentle persistence. He
is evidently of a persevering rather than vindictive disposition.

Then there is Unter den Linden. This celebrated thoroughfare is an old
communication-trench. It runs, half-ruined, from the old German trench
in our rear, right through our own front line, to the present German
trenches. It constitutes such a bogey as the Channel Tunnel scheme
once was: each side sits jealously at its own end, anticipating
hostile enterprises from the other. It is also the residence of
"Minnie." But we will return to Minnie later.

The artillery of both sides, too, contributes its mite. There is
a dull roar far in the rear of the German trenches, followed by a
whirring squeak overhead. Then comes an earth-shaking crash a mile
behind us. We whip round, and there, in the failing evening light,
against the sunset, there springs up the silhouette of a mighty tree
in full foliage. Presently the