e wheezing
accompaniment of an old mouth-organ. But of reference to home, or
mothers, or comradeship,--nothing.

Rarely a night passed without its burial parties. "Digging in the garden"
Tommy calls the grave-making. The bodies, wrapped in blankets or
waterproof ground-sheets, are lifted over the parados, and carried back a
convenient twenty yards or more. The desolation of that garden, choked
with weeds and a wild growth of self-sown crops, is indescribable. It was
wreckage-strewn, gaping with shell holes, billowing with innumerable
graves, a waste land speechlessly pathetic. The poplar trees and willow
hedges have been blasted and splintered by shell fire. Tommy calls these
"Kaiser Bill's flowers." Coming from England, he feels more deeply than
he would care to admit the crimes done to trees in the name of war.

Our chaplain was a devout man, but prudent to a fault. Never, to my
knowledge, did he visit us in the trenches. Therefore our burial parties
proceeded without the rites of the Church. This arrangement was highly
satisfactory to Tommy. He liked to "get the planting done" with the least
possible delay or fuss. His whispered conversations while the graves were
being scooped were, to say the least, quite out of the spirit of the
occasion. Once we were burying two boys with whom we had been having
supper a few hours before. There was an artillery duel in progress, the
shells whistling high over our heads, and bursting in great splotches of
white fire, far in rear of the opposing lines of trenches. The
grave-making went speedily on, while the burial party argued in whispers
as to the caliber of the guns. Some said they were six-inch, while others
thought nine-inch. Discussion was momentarily suspended when a trench
rocket shot in an arc from the enemy's line. We crouched, motionless,
until the welcome darkness spread again.

And then, in loud whispers:--

"'Ere! If they was nine-inch, they would 'ave more screech."

And one from the other school of opinion would reply:--

"Don't talk so bloomin' silly! Ain't I a-tellin' you that you can't
always size 'em by the screech?"

Not a prayer; not a word, either of censure or of praise, for the boys
who had gone; not an expression of opinion as to the meaning of the great
change which had come to them and which might come, as suddenly, to any
or all of us. And yet I knew that they were each thinking of these
things.

There were days when the front was really quiet.