The refrain grew more and more insistent.  At last a head appeared above the German parapet.  It rose gradually, as though the owner were being hoisted by unseen hands.  He rose, as the principal character in a Punch and Judy show rises, with jerky articulations of his members from the ventriloquial depths below.  The body followed, until a three-quarter posture was attained.  The owner, with his hand upon his heart, bowed gracefully three times and then disappeared.  It was Mueller!

It is some months since I was in the British trenches,[28] and I often wonder how our men have accommodated themselves to the ever-increasing multiplication of the apparatus of war.  The fire trenches I visited were about wide enough to allow two men to pass one another—­and that was all.  Obviously the wider your trench the greater your exposure to the effects of shell-fire, and if we go on introducing trench-mortars, and gas-pumps, and gas-extinguishers, to say nothing of a great store of bombs, as pleasing in variety and as startling in their effects as Christmas crackers, our trenches will soon be as full of furniture as a Welsh miner’s parlour.  But doubtless the sappers have arranged all that.  Some of these improvements are viewed by company officers without enthusiasm.  The trench-mortar, for example, is distinctly unpopular, for it draws the enemy’s fire, besides being an uncanny thing to handle, although the handling is done not by the company but by a “battery” of R.G.A. men, who come down and select a “pitch.”  I have seen a trench-mortar in action—­it is like a baby howitzer, and makes a prodigious noise.  Our own men deprecate it and the enemy resent it.  It is an invidious thing.  The gas-extinguisher is less objectionable, and, incidentally, less exacting in the matter of accommodation.  It is a large copper vessel resembling nothing so much as the fire-extinguishing cylinders one sees in public buildings at home.  About our gas-pumps I know nothing except by hearsay.  They are in charge of “corporals” in the chemical corps of the sappers, and your corporal is, in nine cases out of ten, a man whose position in the scientific world at home is one of considerable distinction.  He is usually a lecturer or Assistant-Professor in Chemistry at one of our University Colleges who has left his test-tubes and quantitative analysis for the more exciting allurements of the trenches.  I sometimes wonder what name the fertile brain of the British soldier has found for him—­probably “the squid.”  He has three gases in his repertoire, each more deadly than the other.  One of them is comparatively innocuous—­it disables without debilitating; and its effect passes off in about twenty minutes.  The truth is that we do not take very kindly to the use of this kind of thing.  Still, our men know their business, and our gas, whichever variety it was, played a very effective part in the capture of the Hohenzollern Redoubt.