lives if you stay here quite quietly."

"Great God!" said one of the M. P.'s, and the other was silent, but
pale.

Certainly there was all the noise of a big attack. The Worcesters were
standing-to on the fire-step, firing rifle--grenades and throwing
bombs with terrific energy. Every now and then a man fell, and the
stretcher-bearers pounced on him, tied him up in bandages, and carried
him away to the field dressing-station, whistling as they went, "We
won't go home till morning," in a most heroic way... The battle lasted
twenty minutes, at the end of which time the colonel announced to his
visitors:

"The attack is repulsed, and you, gentlemen, have nothing more to fear."

One of the M. P.'s was thrilled with excitement. "The valor of your men
was marvelous," he said. "What impressed me most was the cheerfulness
of the wounded. They were actually grinning as they came down on the
stretchers."

The colonel grinned, too. In fact, he stifled a fit of coughing. "Funny
devils!" he said. "They are so glad to be going home."

The members of Parliament went away enormously impressed, but they had
not enjoyed themselves nearly as well as the Worcesters, who had fought
a sham battle--not in the front-line trenches, but in the support
trenches two miles back! They laughed for a week afterward.

XVII

On the hill at Wizerne, not far from the stately old town of St.-Omer
(visited from time to time by monstrous nightbirds who dropped
high-explosive eggs), was a large convent. There were no nuns there, but
generally some hundreds of young officers and men from many different
battalions, attending a machine-gun course under the direction of
General Baker-Carr, who was the master machine-gunner of the British
army (at a time when we were very weak in those weapons compared with
the enemy's strength) and a cheery, vital man.

"This war has produced two great dugouts," said Lord Kitchener on a
visit to the convent. "Me and Baker-Carr."

It was the boys who interested me more than the machines. (I was never
much interested in the machinery of war.) They came down from the
trenches to this school with a sense of escape from prison, and for the
ten days of their course they were like "freshers" at Oxford and made
the most of their minutes, organizing concerts and other entertainments
in the evenings after their initiation into the mysteries of Vickers
and Lewis. I was invited to dinner there one night, and sat between