rgans and laughter.
Presently, in a lull, one of our sergeants repeated the request, "Come
over here!"

"You come half-way--I come half-way," floated out of the darkness.

"Come on, then!" shouted the sergeant. "I'm coming along the hedge!"

"Ah! but there are two of you," came back the voice from the other side.

Well, anyway, after much suspicious shouting and jocular derision from
both sides, our sergeant went along the hedge which ran at right-angles
to the two lines of trenches. He was quickly out of sight; but, as we
all listened in breathless silence, we soon heard a spasmodic
conversation taking place out there in the darkness.

Presently, the sergeant returned. He had with him a few German cigars
and cigarettes which he had exchanged for a couple of Maconochie's and a
tin of Capstan, which he had taken with him. The seance was over, but it
had given just the requisite touch to our Christmas Eve--something a
little human and out of the ordinary routine.

After months of vindictive sniping and shelling, this little episode
came as an invigorating tonic, and a welcome relief to the daily
monotony of antagonism. It did not lessen our ardour or determination;
but just put a little human punctuation mark in our lives of cold and
humid hate. Just on the right day, too--Christmas Eve! But, as a curious
episode, this was nothing in comparison to our experience on the
following day.

On Christmas morning I awoke very early, and emerged from my dug-out
into the trench. It was a perfect day. A beautiful, cloudless blue sky.
The ground hard and white, fading off towards the wood in a thin
low-lying mist. It was such a day as is invariably depicted by artists
on Christmas cards--the ideal Christmas Day of fiction.

"Fancy all this hate, war, and discomfort on a day like this!" I thought
to myself. The whole spirit of Christmas seemed to be there, so much so
that I remember thinking, "This indescribable something in the air, this
Peace and Goodwill feeling, surely will have some effect on the
situation here to-day!" And I wasn't far wrong; it did around us,
anyway, and I have always been so glad to think of my luck in, firstly,
being actually in the trenches on Christmas Day, and, secondly, being on
the spot where quite a unique little episode took place.

Everything looked merry and bright that morning--the discomforts seemed
to be less, somehow; they seemed to have epitomized themselves in
intense, frosty cold. It