nces if 'e don't."

"No more will I." The Brigade-Major mopped his brow. "For heaven's
sake get on with it."

Thus ended the episode of Percy FitzPercy--his man-trap.

It might have happened to any one, but only FitzPercy would have
searched carefully amongst the crockery, and having found what he was
looking for made a point of bringing it to head-quarters just as the
tin was finally removed.

To emerge into the light of two candles and an electric torch with a
bit of one ear and half a face deficient, and realise that the man
responsible for it is offering you your uppers in three parts and some
fragments, is a situation too dreadful to contemplate.

As I said before, Percy gave up trying after about ten seconds.

IV

A POINT OF DETAIL

"Hist!" The officer gripped the sergeant's arm just above the elbow,
bringing his mouth close up to his ear. "Don't move." The words were
hardly breathed, so low was the tense, sudden whisper, and the two men
crouched motionless, peering into the darkness which enveloped them.

"Where, sir?" The sergeant slowly twisted his head till it was almost
touching that of the man beside him; and he too, whose normal voice
resembled a human fog horn, scarcely did more than frame the words with
his lips.

"Behind that mound of chalk. Several of them." The sergeant's eyes
followed the line of the outstretched hand until they picked up the
dark menacing lump in the ground twenty feet away. Sombre, grim,
apparently lifeless, outlined against the night sky--it appeared almost
monstrous in size to the men who lay on the edge of a shell hole, with
every nerve alert. A bullet spat over them viciously, but they did not
alter their position--they knew they were not the target; and from
their own lines came the sudden clang of a shovel. All around them the
night was full of vague, indefinable noises; instinctively a man,
brought suddenly into such a place and ignorant of his whereabouts,
would have known that there were men all around him: men whom he could
not see, men who flitted through the shadows bent on mysterious tasks,
men who moved silently, with eyes strained to pierce the darkness.
Behind the German lines a trench tramway was in use; the metallic
rumble of the trolleys on the iron rails came continuously from the
distance. And suddenly from close at hand a man laughed. . . .

"Do you see them?" Once again the officer was whispering, while he
still grasped, almo