five minutes each noontide:  it is therefore advisable to select some other hour for one’s daily visit. (Silent Susan, by the way, is not a desirable member of the sex.  Owing to her intensely high velocity she arrives overhead without a sound, and then bursts with a perfectly stunning detonation and a shower of small shrapnel bullets.) There is a fixed rifle-battery, too, which fires all day long, a shot at a time, down the main street of the ruined and deserted village named Vrjoozlehem, through which one must pass on the way to the front-line trenches.  Therefore in negotiating this delectable spot, one shapes a laborious course through a series of back yards and garden-plots, littered with broken furniture and brick rubble, allowing the rifle-bullets the undisputed use of the street.  The mention of Vrjoozlehem—­that is not its real name, but a simplified form of it—­brings to our notice the wholesale and whole-hearted fashion in which the British Army has taken Belgian institutions under its wing.  Nomenclature, for instance.  In France we make no attempt to interfere with this:  we content ourselves with devising a pronounceable variation of the existing name.  For example, if a road is called La Rue de Bois, we simply call it “Roodiboys,” and leave it at that.  On the same principle, Etaples is modified to “Eatables,” and Sailly-la-Bourse to “Sally Booze.”  But in Belgium more drastic procedure is required.  A Scotsman is accustomed to pronouncing difficult names, but even he is unable to contend with words composed almost entirely of the letters j, z, and v.  So our resourceful Ordnance Department has issued maps—­admirable maps—­upon which the outstanding features of the landscape are marked in plain figures.  But instead of printing the original place-names, they put “Moated Grange,” or “Clapham Junction,” or “Dead Dog Farm,” which simplifies matters beyond all possibility of error. (The system was once responsible, though, for an unjust if unintentional aspersion upon the character of a worthy man.  The C.O. of a certain battalion had occasion to complain to those above him of the remissness of one of his chaplains.  “He’s a lazy beggar, sir,” he said.  “Over and over again I have told him to come up and show himself in the front-line trenches, but he never seems to be able to get past Leicester Square!”)

The naming of the trenches themselves has been left largely to local enterprise.  An observant person can tell, by a study of the numerous name-boards, which of his countrymen have been occupying the line during the past six months.  “Grainger Street” and “Jesmond Dene” give direct evidence of “Canny N’castle.”  “Sherwood Avenue” and “Notts Forest” have a Midland flavour.  Lastly, no great mental effort is required to decide who labelled two communication trenches “The Gorbals” and “Coocaddens” respectively!

Some names have obviously been bestowed by officers, as “Sackville Street,” “The Albany,” and “Burlington Arcade” denote.  “Pinch-Gut” and “Crab-Crawl” speak for themselves.  So does “Vermin Villa.”  Other localities, again, have obviously been labelled by persons endowed with a nice gift of irony.  “Sanctuary Wood” is the last place on earth where any one would dream of taking sanctuary; while “Lovers’ Walk,” which bounds it, is the scene of almost daily expositions of the choicest brand of Boche “hate.”