till far into the night; but they don't do half as much damage as you
would think, though it is annoying to have all that row going on when
you're trying to write home or make up the regimental accounts."

Writing home is certainly done under circumstances which are apt to have
a disturbing effect upon the literary style. "Excuse this scrawl,"
writes one soldier, "the German shells have interrupted me six times
already, and I had to dash out with my bayonet before I was able to
finish it off." Another concludes: "Well, mother, I must close now. The
bullets are a bit too thick for letter-writing." To a young engineer the
experience was so strange that he describes it as "like writing in a
dream."

Some of the nick-names given by Tommy Atkins to the German shells have
already been quoted, but the most amusing is surely that in a letter
from Private Watters. "One of our men," he relates, "has got a ripping
cure for neuralgia, but he isn't going to take out a patent for it!
While lying in the trenches, mad with pain in the face, a shell burst
beside him. He wasn't hit, but the explosion rendered him unconscious
for a time, and when he recovered, his neuralgia had gone. His name is
Palmer, so now we call the German shells 'Palmer's Neuralgia Cure.'"

The amusing story of a long march afforded some mirth in the trenches
when it got to be known. A party of artillerymen who had been toiling
along in the dark for hours, and were like to drop with fatigue, ran
straight into a troop of horsemen posted near a wood. "We thought they
were Germans," one gunner related, "for we couldn't make out the colors
of the uniforms or anything else, until we heard some one sing out
'Where the hell do you think you're going to?' _Then we knew we were
with friends._"