e signifying complete
absence of. Largely heard in estaminets near closing time.

_Naploo_.--Original pure English phrase signifying the perisher has run
out of beer.

_Napoo_.--Vulgar and bastardised shortening of original pure English
phrase. Has now been added to B.E.F. dictionary, and is used to imply
that a man, thing, person, animal, or what not, is "finished."

II

OVER THE TOP

"On the afternoon of the 21st we gained a small local success. Our
line was advanced on a front of six hundred yards, over an average
depth of a quarter of a mile. All the ground gained was successfully
consolidated. Up to date eighty-six unwounded prisoners have passed
through the corps cage, of whom three are officers."

Thus ran the brief official notice so tersely given in the
"Intelligence Summary," known to the ribald as "Comic Cuts"; later it
will appear even more tersely in the daily communique which delights
the matutinal kipper and twin eggs of England. It's all so simple; it
all sounds such a ridiculously easy matter to those who read. Map
maniacs stab inaccurate maps with pins; a few amateur strategists
discourse at length, and with incredible ignorance, on the bearing
it--and countless other similar operations--will have on the main
issue. And the vast majority remark gloomily to the other members of
the breakfast table that there is nothing in the paper as usual.
Nothing, my friend! I wonder. . . .

This is not a story; there is no plot; it is just what happens every
day somewhere or other in the land of glutinous, stinking mud, where
the soles are pulled off a man's boots when he walks and horses go in
up to their bellies; where one steers a precarious and slippery course
on the narrow necks of earth that separate shell holes, and huddled
things stare up at the sky with unseeing eyes. They went "over the
top" themselves--ten days ago--in just such another local success.
Nothing, my friend! Perhaps you're right; it's mainly a sense of
proportion that is needed in war, as in other things. . . .

"Good morning, dear old soul." The machine-gun officer emerged from a
watery hole of doubtful aspect, covered with a dented sheet of
corrugated iron and a flattened-out biscuit tin--the hole that is, not
the officer. "We have slept well, thank you; and the wife and family
are flourishing. Moreover--you're late."

The Sapper regarded him pessimistically through the chilly mist of an
October dawn. "Ent