in such silence and with such little traffic that it seemed like the
provision of manna in the wilderness. At dawn pick-axe and spade were
laid aside, the rum ration was served out, and all men stood to, for
dawn was the hour of their apprehension.

Two miles behind them is a battery of our field guns, and they have with
them an observing officer who talks intimately to his battery on the
field telephone in that laconic language of which gunners are so fond,
such as "One hundred. Twenty minutes to the left." Then the shells sing
over their heads with a pretty low trajectory, and the Huns, beginning
to get annoyed, reply with their heavy guns. There is a low whistle up
aloft, a noise like the fluttering of invisible wings, and the next
moment a cloud of black smoke rises over the village of X---- Y----,
behind the trenches. The Smoke Prevention Society ought to turn their
attention to "Jack Johnsons"; their habits are positively filthy.

These things, however, disturbed them but little and bored them a great
deal. So they set to work to make their particular rabbit-warren into a
Garden City. They held it on a repairing lease, and were constantly
filling sand-bags, but that was merely to prevent depreciation, and
didn't count. They first of all paved their trenches with bricks; there
was no difficulty about the supply, as the "Jack Johnsons" obligingly
acted as house-breakers in the village behind our lines, and bricks
could be had for the fetching. Then the orderly transplanted some
pansies and forget-me-nots from the garden of a ruined house, and made a
border in front of the company commander's dug-out. The communication
trench had been carried across a stream with some planks, and one day a
man with a gift for carpentry fixed up a balustrade out of the arms of
an apple-tree, which had been lopped off by shell, and we had a rustic
bridge. When May came, water anemones opened their star-like petals on