the ineffective explosion--all made up a sort of
game. The Towers had had a good many unhappy experiences with bombs,
and at first played the unknown game carefully and anxiously, and with
some doubts as to its results. But they soon picked it up, and
presently made quite merry at it, laughing and shouting noisily,
tumbling and picking themselves up and laughing again like children.

They lost three men, who were wounded through their slowness in
escaping from the compartment where the bomb exploded, and this rather
put the Towers on their mettle. As Private Robinson remarked, it wasn't
the cheese that a Frenchman should beat an Englishman at any blooming
game.

"If we could only get a little bit of a stake on it," he said
wistfully, "we could take 'em on, the winners being them that loses
least men."

It being impossible, however, to convey to the Frenchmen that interest
would be added by the addition of a little bet, the Towers had to
content themselves with playing platoon against platoon amongst
themselves, the losing platoon pay, what they could conveniently
afford, the day's rations of the men who were casualtied. The
subsequent task of dividing one and a quarter pots of jam, five
portions of cheese, bacon and a meat-and-potato stew was only settled
eventually by resource to a set of dice.

As the bombing continued methodically, the French artillery, who were
still covering this portion of the trench, set to work to silence the
mortar, and the Towers thoroughly enjoyed the ensuing performance, and
the generous, not to say extravagant, fashion in which the French
battery, after the usual custom of French batteries, lavished its
shells upon the task. For five minutes the battery spoke in
four-tongued emphatic tones, and the shells screamed over the forward
trench, crackled and crashed above the German line, dotted the German
parapet along its length, played up and down it in long bursts of fire,
and deluged the suspected hiding-place of the mortar with a torrent of
high explosive. When it stopped, the bombing also had stopped for that
day.

The French infantry did not wait for the ceasing of the artillery fire.
They gathered themselves and their belongings and recommenced to move
as soon as the guns began to speak.

"Feenish!" as one of them said, placing a finger on the ground, lifting
it in a long curve, twirling it over and over and downward again in
imitation of a falling bomb. "Ze soixante-quinze speak,