and
his table manners have vastly improved. They have progressed from
candles stuck in bully-beef tins to electric reading-lamps. Three months
ago they were hairy men whose beards did grow beneath their shoulders,
and their puttees were cemented with wet clay; to-day they are
clean-shaven and their Burberrys might be worn in Piccadilly. They slept
with nothing between them and the earth but a ground sheet what time
they were not, like the elephant, sleeping on their feet and propped
against a trench wall. Now they sleep on a bed with a wooden frame. I
have read somewhere that for a thousand years Europe was unwashed. It
may be so, but I know that this particular tribal community progressed
rapidly through all such stages, from a bucket to a shower-bath in
billets, in about six weeks, and you can see their men any day washing
themselves to the waist near the support trenches--men who a month or
two ago had forgotten how to take their clothes off. They are, in fact,
a highly civilised community. Some traces of their aboriginal state they
still retain, and they cherish their totem, which is a bundle of black
ribbons, rather like the flattened leaves of an artichoke, attached to
the back of their collars. It is the badge of their tribe. Also at night
some of them develop the most primitive of all instincts and crawl out
on their stomachs with a hand-grenade to get as near as may be to the
enemy's listening posts and taste the joy of killing. But by day they
are as demure and sleepy as the tortoiseshell cat which has taken up its
quarters in the dug-out.

Such is their life. But they are quietly preparing to get a move on.
Some R.G.A. men have arrived with four pretty toys from Vickers's, and
one fine morning they are going to disturb those sand-bags opposite them
with a battery of trench mortars; our field guns will draw a curtain of
shrapnel in front of the German support trenches, and then they will
satisfy their curiosity as to what is behind those inscrutable
sand-bags.

IX

STOKES'S ACT

An offender when in arrest is not to bear arms except by order of
his C.O. or in an emergency.--_The King's Regulations._

I

The President of the Court and the Judge-Advocate stood in private
colloquy in one of the deep traverse-like windows of the Hotel de Ville
over-looking the Place. A heavy rain was falling from a sullen sky, and
the deserted square was a dancing sea of agitation as the raindrops
smote t