“A Boche joke!” Tommy explained.

“Probably they are hating the French to-day?”

“No, it’s been there for some days.  They want us to shoot at the flag of our ally.  They’d get a laugh out of that—­a regular Boche notion of humour.”

“If it were a German flag?” I suggested.

“What hopes!  We’d make it into a lace curtain!”

Even the guns had ceased firing.  The birds in their evensong had all the war to themselves.  It was difficult to believe that if you stood on top of the parapet anybody would shoot at you; no, not even if you walked down the road that ran through the wheatfield, everything was so peaceful.  One grew sceptical of there being any Germans in the trenches opposite.

“There are three or four sharpshooters and a fat old Boche professor in spectacles, who moves a machine-gun up and down for a bluff,” said a soldier, and another corrected him: 

“No, the old professor’s the one that walks along at night sending up flares!”

“Munching K.K. bread with his false teeth!”

“And singing the hymn of hate!”

Thus the talk ran on in the quiet of evening, till we heard a concussion and a quarter of a mile away, behind a screen of trees, a pillar of smoke rose to the height of two or three hundred feet.

“A mine!” In front of the -th brigade!”

“Ours or the Boches’?”

“Ours, from the way the smoke went—­our fuse!”

“No, theirs!”

Our colonel telephoned down to know if we knew whose mine it was, which was the question we wanted to ask him.  The guns from both sides became busy under the column of smoke.  Oh, yes, there were Germans in the trenches which had appeared vacant.  Their shots and ours merged in the hissing medley of a tempest.

“Not enough guns—­not enough noise for an attack!” said experienced Tommy, who knew what an attack was like.

The commander of the adjoining brigade telephoned to the division commander, who passed the word through to our colonel, who passed it to us that the mine was German and had burst thirty yards short of the British trench.

“After all that digging, wasting Boche powder in that fashion!  The Kaiser won’t like it!” said Mr. Atkins.  “We exploded one under them yesterday and it made them hate so hard they couldn’t wait.  They’ve awful tempers, the Boches!” And he finished the job on which he was engaged when interrupted, eating a large piece of ration bread surmounted by all the ration jam it could hold; while one of the company officers reminded me that it was about dinner time.

“What do you think I am?  A blooming traffic policeman?” growled the cook to two soldiers who had found themselves in a blind alley in the maze of streets back of the firing-trench.  “My word!  Is His Majesty’s army becoming illiterate?  Strafe that sign at the corner!  What do you think we put it up for?  To show what a beautiful hand we had at printing?”