, so we let our imaginations play.
We hold conversations with Hans and Jacob in our long watches.
Hans is fat and cheerful and trusting. He believes every thing that the
Kaiser tells him and has a cheerful disposition. But Jacob is a
professor and a fearful 'strafer.' It seems a little gruesome, doesn't it,
but not after you have been in the trenches for a while."

A little gruesome--true! Not in the trenches--true, too! Where all is
satire, no incongruity seems out of place. Life plays in and out with
death; they intermingle; they look each other in the face and say: "I
know you. We dwell together. Let us smile when we may, at what we
may, to hide the character of our comradeship; for to-morrow------"

Only half an hour before one of the officers had been shot through
the head by a sniper. He was a popular officer. The others had
messed with him and marched with him and known him in the
fullness of affection of comradeship in arms and dangers shared. A
heartbreak for some home in England. No one dwelt on the incident.
What was there to say? The trembling lip, trembling in spite of itself,
was the only outward sign of the depth of feeling that words could not
reflect, at tea in the dug-out. The subject was changed to something
about the living. One must carry on cheerfully; one must be on the
alert; one must play his part serenely, unflinchingly, for the sake of the
nerves around him and for his own sake. Such fortitude becomes
automatic, it would seem. Please, I must not hesitate about having a
slice of cake. They managed cake without any difficulty up there in
the trenches. And who if not men in the trenches was entitled to cake,
I should like to know? "It was here that he was hit," another officer
said, as we moved on in the trench. "He was saying that the
sandbags were a little weak and a bullet might go through and catch
a man who thought himself safely under cover as he walked along.
He had started to fix the sandbags himself when he got it. The bullet
came right through the top of one of the bags in front of him."

A bullet makes the merciful wound; and a bullet through the head is a
simple way of going. The bad wounds come mostly from shells; but
there is something about seeing anyone hit by a sniper which is more
horrible. It is a cold-blooded kind of killing, more suggestive of
murder, this single shot from a sharpshooter waiting as patiently as a
cat for a mouse, aimed definitely to take the life of a man.