away, when some pencilled words caught his eye.

"I leave it to God," he read, "to decide whether you live or die. If you
have not drunk any wine, do not, for it is poisoned. If you have, you
are lost, and nothing can save you. The victorious French will find your
corpse, and will rejoice. Vae victis! Woe to the conquered!"

And even as he read the hurriedly written words, von Scheldmann felt the
first awful sense of numbness that presaged the end.

VII

THE ODD JOBS

We sat in a railway carriage and told each other, as civilians love to
do, what was the quickest way to end the war. "You ought to be able to
hold nearly 400 yards of trench with a company," my friend was saying.
"You see, a company nowadays gives you 250 fighting men to man the
trenches."

And then the muddy figure in the corner, the only other occupant of the
carriage, woke up. "You don't know what you're talking about," he
snorted as he tossed his cap up on to the rack, and put his feet on the
opposite seat.

"You don't know what you're talking about," he repeated. "You're lucky
if your company can produce more than 150 men to man the trenches; you
forget altogether about the odd jobs. Take the company I'm in at the
front, for instance. Do you imagine we've got 250 men to man the
trenches? First of all there are always men being hit and going sick, or
men who are sent off to guard lines of communication, and their places
aren't filled up by fresh drafts for weeks. As for the odd jobs, there's
no end to them. My own particular pal is a telephone orderly--he sits
all day in a dug-out and wakes up at stated hours to telephone 'No
change in the situation' to battalion headquarters. It's true that he
does jolly good work when the Huns 'strafe' his wire and he has to go
out and mend it, but he doesn't go forward in an attack; he sits in his
dug-out and telephones like blazes for reinforcements while the Germans
pepper his roof for him with 'whizz-bangs.'

"Then there's old Joe White, the man like a walrus, who left us months
ago to go and guard divisional headquarters; there are five officers'
servants who are far too busy to man a trench; there is a post corporal,
who goes down to meet the transport every night to fetch the company's
letters, and who generally brings up a sack of bread by mistake or drops
the parcels into shell holes that are full of water; there's a black,
greasy fellow who calls himself a cook, and who looks after a big '