the only outward sign of the depth of feeling that words could not reflect, at tea in the dug-out.  The subject was changed to something about the living.  One must carry on cheerfully; one must be on the alert; one must play his part serenely, unflinchingly, for the sake of the nerves around him and for his own sake.  Such fortitude becomes automatic, it would seem.  Please, I must not hesitate about having a slice of cake.  They managed cake without any difficulty up there in the trenches.  And who if not men in the trenches was entitled to cake, I should like to know?  “It was here that he was hit,” another officer said, as we moved on in the trench.  “He was saying that the sandbags were a little weak and a bullet might go through and catch a man who thought himself safely under cover as he walked along.  He had started to fix the sandbags himself when he got it.  The bullet came right through the top of one of the bags in front of him.”

A bullet makes the merciful wound; and a bullet through the head is a simple way of going.  The bad wounds come mostly from shells; but there is something about seeing anyone hit by a sniper which is more horrible.  It is a cold-blooded kind of killing, more suggestive of murder, this single shot from a sharpshooter waiting as patiently as a cat for a mouse, aimed definitely to take the life of a man.

Again we move on in that narrow cut of earth with its waiting soldiers, which the world knows so well from reading tours of the trenches.  No one not on watch might show his head on an afternoon like this.  The men were prisoners between those walls of earth; not even spectators of what the guns were doing; simply moles.  They took it all as a part of the day’s work, with that singular, redoubtable combination of British phlegm and cheerfulness.

Of course, some of them were eating bread and marmalade and making tea.  Where all the marmalade goes which Mr. Atkins uses for his personal munition in fighting the Germans puzzles the Army Service Corps, whose business it is to see that he is never without it.  How could he sit so calmly under shell-fire without marmalade?  Never!  He would get fidgety and forget his lesson, I am sure, like the boy who had the button which he was used to fingering removed before he went to recite.

Any minute a shell may come.  Mr. Atkins does not think of that.  Time enough to think after it has arrived.  Then perhaps the burial party will be doing your thinking for you; or if not, the doctors and the nurses who look after you will.

I noted certain acts of fellowship of comrades who are all in the same boat and have learned unselfishness.  When they got up to let you pass and you smiled your thanks, you received a much pleasanter smile in return than you will from many a well-fed gentleman who has to stand aside to let you enter a restaurant.  The manners of the trenches are good, better than in some places where good manners are a cult.