not detract from the splendour of his notices, on which he spent much
paint and happiness.

With the slightest encouragement he would have placarded that
arid wilderness with "NO SMOKING IN THE LIFTS," and "BEWARE OF
PICKPOCKETS," but he had small encouragement, and so he contented
himself with a final placard which warned the troops against riding
through standing crops and occupying the houses of civilians without
permission from the Town-Major.

Still, no one becomes a Town-Major without some sort of claim to the
post.

Second-Lieut. St. John's first appearance in Armageddon took place
during "peace-time warfare." An unpleasant and quite unnecessary
little bulge in the trench-line, known as the Toadstool, was manned
by the platoon of which he found himself second-in-command. It is
rumoured that a Hun patrol, crawling to the edge of our parapet,
saw in the ghastly glare of a Verey light the benign and spectacled
countenance of Second-Lieut. St. John staring amiably across No Man's
Land, and came to the hasty conclusion that they had made a mistake as
to direction, since here was obviously one of their own officers of
the Herr Professor type. Rumour adds that they retired to their own
lines and were promptly shot for cowardice.

Certain it is that on that particular night Second-Lieut. St. John did
a thing the full details of which are now revealed to the Intelligence
Corps for the first time. He fired a Verey light. It pleased him
enormously. The sense that he, and he alone, was the cause of all
those sliding shadows and that flood of greenish light in No Man's