tank'
called a 'cooker,' from which he extracts oily tea, and meat covered
with tea-leaves. Besides all these fellows there are sixteen sanitary
men who wander about with tins of chloride of lime and keep the trench
clean--they don't man the trenches; then there are three battalion
orderlies, who run about with messages from headquarters and who wake
the captain up, as soon as he gets to sleep, to ask him to state in
writing how much cheese was issued to his men yesterday or why Private X
has not had his hair cut.

"Do you imagine this finishes the list? Not a bit of it. There are half
a dozen machine gunners who have nothing to do with company work; half a
dozen men and a quartermaster-sergeant attached to the transport to look
after the horses and to flirt with girls in farms; two mess waiters
whose job it is to feed the officers; and there are four men who have
the rottenest time of anyone--they're the miners who burrow and dig, dig
and burrow day and night towards the German lines; poor half-naked
fellows who wheel little trucks of earth to the pit shaft or who lie on
their stomachs working away with picks. And it's always an awful race to
see if they'll blow up the Germans, or if it will be the other way
about.

"There are still more odd jobs, and new ones turn up every day. Mind
you, I'm not grumbling, for many of these fellows work harder than we
do, and we must have someone to feed us and to keep the place clean. But
the difficulty is nowadays to find a man who's got time to stand in the
trench and wait for the Hun to attack, and that's what you people don't
seem to realise."

"And what do you do?" asked my friend as the other stopped to yawn.

"What do I do? What do you think I've been talking for all this time?"
said the man in khaki. "I'm the fellow who stands in the trench and
waits for the Hun to attack. That's a jolly long job, and I've got some
sleep owing to me for it, too."

Whereupon he stretched himself out on the seat, pillowed his head on his
pack, and proceeded to extract noisy payment of his debt.

"That rather complicates matters, doesn't it?" said my friend, when the
muddy figure had safely reached the land of dreams. "If you've only got
150 fighting men in a company, your division has a strength of ..." and
he proceeded to count away on his fingers as hard as he could. Presently
he gave it up in despair, and a brilliant idea seemed to strike him.

"Those generals and staff fellows," he