is Majesty's
army becoming illiterate? Strafe that sign at the corner! What do you
think we put it up for? To show what a beautiful hand we had at
printing?"

The sign on a board fastened against the earth wall read, "No
thoroughfare!" The soldier-cook, with a fork in his hand, his sleeves
rolled up, his shirt open at his tanned throat, looked formidable. He
was preoccupied; he was at close quarters roasting a chicken over a
small stove. Yes, they have cook-stoves in the trenches. Why not?
The line had been in the same position for six months.

"Little by little we improve our happy home," said the cook.

The latest acquisition was a lace curtain for the officers' mess hall,
bought at a shop in the nearest town.

When the cook was inside his kitchen there was no room to spill
anything on the floor. The kitchen was about three feet square, with
boarded walls, and a roof covered with tar paper and a layer of earth
set level with the trench parapet. The chicken roasted and the frying
potatoes sizzled as an occasional bullet passed overhead, even as
flies buzz about the screen door when Mary is making cakes for tea.

The officers' mess hall, next to the kitchen and built in the same
fashion, had some boards nailed on posts sunk in the ground for a
table, which was proof against tipping when you climbed over it or
squeezed around it to your place. The chairs were rifle-ammunition
boxes, whose contents had been emptied with individual care, bullet
by bullet, at the Germans in the trench on the other side of the
wheatfield. Dinner was at nine in the evening, when it was still twilight
in the longest days of the year in this region. The hour fits in with
trench routine, when night is the time to be on guard and you sleep
by day. Breakfast comes at nine in the morning. I was invited to help
eat the chicken and to spend the night.

Now, the general commanding the brigade who accompanied me to
the trenches had been hit twice. So had the colonel, a man about
forty. From forty, ages among the regimental officers dropped into the
twenties.

Many of the older men who started in the war had been killed, or were
back in England wounded, or had been promoted to other commands
where their experience was more useful. To youth, life is sweet and
danger is life. The oldest of the officers of the proud old K.O.P.F. who
gathered for dinner was about twenty-five, though when he assumed
an air of authority he seemed to be forty. It was