when they push up close to the front line and play for half an hour or
so with their rivals: the enemy sends stuff back, our artillery join
in; it is as though, while you were playing a game of croquet, giants
hundreds of feet high, some of them friendly, some unfriendly,
carnivorous and hungry, came and played football on your croquet lawn.

We go on past Battalion Headquarters, and past the dugouts and
shelters of various people having business with History, past stores
of bombs and the many other ingredients with which history is made,
past men coming down who are very hard to pass, for the width of two
men and two packs is the width of a communication trench and sometimes
an inch over; past two men carrying a flying pig slung on a pole
between them; by many turnings; and Windmill Avenue brings you at last
to Company Headquarters in a dugout that Hindenburg made with his
German thoroughness.

And there, after a while, descends the Tok Emma man, the officer
commanding a trench mortar battery, and is given perchance a whiskey
and water, and sits on the best empty box that we have to offer, and
lights one of our cigarettes.

``There's going to be a bit of a strafe at 5.30,'' he says.

What Happened on the Night of the Twenty-Seventh

The night of the twenty-seventh was Dick Cheeser's first night on
sentry. The night was far gone when he went on duty; in another hour
they would stand to. Dick Cheeser had camouflaged his age when he
enlisted: he was barely eighteen. A wonderfully short time ago he was
quite a little boy; now he was in a frontline trench. It hadn't seemed