flare, and then all is still again. In such excursions and alarms do
they pass the long night.

Though five-sixths of them slept stertorously in their holes by day, by
night they were as wakeful as owls, and not less predatory. Life in the
trenches is one long struggle for existence, and in the course of it
they developed those acquired characteristics whereby the birds of the
air and the beasts of the field maintain themselves in a world of
carnage. They learnt to walk delicately on the balls of their feet as
silently as hares, to see in the dark like foxes, to wriggle like the
creeping things of the field, to lower their voices with the direction
of the wind, to select a background with the moonlight, and to stand
motionless on patrol with muscles rigid like a pointer when the
star-shells dissolved the security of the night. They studied to
dissemble with their lips and to imitate the vocabulary of nature. They
grew more and more chary of human speech, and listening posts talked
with the trenches by pulls on a fishing-reel. They never sheathed their
claws, and working-parties wore their equipment as though it were the
integument of nature. Bayonets were never unfixed unless the moon were
very bright. At night they scraped out their earths like a badger, and,
like the badger's, those earths were exceeding clean. The men were
numbered off by threes from the flank, and one in three watched for two
hours while the other two worked, repairing parapets, strengthening
entanglements, and filling sand-bags. Every half-hour the N.C.O. on duty
crept round to report, or to post and relieve, while now and again a
patrol went out to observe. All this was done stealthily and with an
amazing economy of speech. Night was also the time of their foraging,
when the company's rations were brought up the communication trench and
handed over by the C.Q.M.S. to each platoon sergeant, who passed them on
to the section commander, and he in turn distributed them among his men