er. But--I digress; sufficient has been said to show that the
two characters were hardly what one would have expected to form an
alliance.

The gentle art of sniping in the battalion when Bill joined with a
draft had been woefully neglected. In fact, it was practically
non-existent. It is not necessary to give any account of how Bill got
the ear of his platoon commander, how he interested him in the
possibilities of sniping in trench warfare, or any other kind of
warfare for that matter, and how ultimately his platoon officer became
mad keen, and with the consent of his C.O. was made Battalion sniping
officer. Though interesting possibly to students of the gun and other
subjects intimately connected with sniping, I have not the time to
describe the growth of the battalion scouts from a name only to the
period when they became a holy terror to the Hun. I am chiefly
concerned with the development of our frock-coated friend into a night
prowler in holes full of death and corruption, and one or two sage
aphorisms from the lips of Shorty Bill which helped that development.
They were nothing new or original, those remarks of his teacher, and
yet they brought home to him for the first time in his life the
enormous gulf which separated him from the men who live with nature.

"Say, kid, do you ever read poetry?" remarked Bill to him one night
soon after the episode of the brick-bats as they sat in an estaminet.
"I guess your average love tosh leaves me like a one-eyed codfish; but
there's a bit I've got in me head writ by some joker who knows me and
the likes o' me.

"'There's a whisper on the night wind, there's a star
agleam to guide us,
And the wild is calling, calling . . . let us go.'"

Shorty contemplatively finished his beer. "'The wild is calling.'
Ever felt that call, kid?"

"Can't say I have, Shorty." His tone was humble; gone was the pathetic
arrogance that had been the pride of Mogg's; in its place the
beginnings of the realisation of his utter futility had come, coupled
with a profound hero worship for the man who had condescended to notice
him. "When are you going to teach me that sniping game?"

The real sniping commander of the battalion--I mean no disrespect to
the worthy young officer who officially filled that position--looked at
the eager face opposite him and laughed.

"You'd better quit it, son. Why, to start with, you're frightened of
the dark."

"I'm damned if I am." The