og that barks abominably every night
opposite L 57. Couldn't you abolish him?" Incidentally we no longer give
our trenches names, such as Piccadilly, Rotten Row, but mere letters and
numbers; the reason being that one of the staff was picked up in a
fainting condition, having strolled down Park Lane and then found
himself, to his horror, in Peckham High Street. The shock--his own home
being in Baling Broadway--had proved too much for his constitution.
However, to refer back to the map once more, our barricade across the
ditch is a most convenient spot for observing artillery fire and as such
is frequently used by me. Unfortunately my view was always hasty and
badly interrupted by the attentions of a Turkish sniper behind their
barricade. This man's name was Ibrahim, and he was a Constantinople
cab-driver, married, with two children, both boys. You may be surprised
that we know so much about the enemy, but we live in such close
proximity that opposite the Lancashire Fusiliers a Turk named Mahomet,
who lives at No. 3, Golden Horn Terrace, told the reporter of _The
Worpington Headlight_ that for three years he had been suffering from
pains in the back--but that's another story. Incidentally Mahomet at
present inhabits a sniper's post surrounded by a perfect thicket of
barbed-wire, and I had a bright scheme for its removal. I got hold of a
trench catapult, an ingenious contrivance of elastic that hurls a bomb
some hundreds of yards, and placed in it a harpoon attached to a long
coil of rope. The idea was that on release of the catapult the harpoon
would be hurled in the air, the rope would neatly pay out, and then, as
soon as the harpoon had grappled Mahomet, all we would have to do would
be to haul on the rope and over would come the whole bag of tricks.
Unfortunately something went wrong, and the rope, instead of neatly
uncoiling, flailed round the trench like a young anaconda, and, catching
a harmless spectator by the leg, hurled him twenty feet in the air.
Immediately the opposition lines resounded like a rifle-booth at a
country fair. However our spectator descended unpunctured, and the only
damage done was to our vanity, when Mahomet threw over a message
attached to a stone to ask whether we would repeat the performance as he
and a pal had a bet on as to who was the best shot and wanted a human
aeroplane to judge.

But we have got a long way from Ibrahim. Ibrahim possessed the headpiece
I am sending you. I could not t