we profited
accordingly; the Boche did not, for he was not allowed close enough to
ours.

Which reminds me that on one occasion, when going round the trenches,
I asked a man whether he had had any shots at the Germans. He
responded that there was an elderly gentleman with a bald head and a
long beard who often showed himself over the parapet.

"Well, why didn't you shoot him?"

"Shoot him?" said the man; "why, Lor' bless you, sir, 'e's never done
_me_ no 'arm!" A case of "live and let live," which is certainly not
to be encouraged. But cold-blooded murder is never popular with our
men.

Talking of anecdotes, and the trend of our men's minds, I heard that
on another occasion a groom, an otherwise excellent creature, wrote
home to his "girl" thus: "Me and the master rode out to the trenches
last night. We was attacked by a strong German patrol. I nips off me
horse, pulls out my rifle and shoots two of them, and the rest
bolted." Not a single atom of truth in the story, except that he was
nestling in a warm stable at an advanced village, whilst his master
was shivering in the mud of the trenches that night.

Another gem was a statement by a Transport officer's servant that he
had shot 1200 Germans himself with a machine-gun. This was a man who,
I verily believe, had never even been within earshot of a gun, much
less seen a German, his duties being exclusively several miles in rear
of the firing line. And, being a civilian up till quite recently, I am
sure he did not know the muzzle of a maxim from its breech.

During our tours in "Divisional reserve" we generally spent the time
in St Jan's Cappel (already described) or Bailleul. The latter town,
with its rather quaint old brick fourteenth-century church, porched _a
la_ Louis Quinze, was tolerable rather than admirable. Nothing of
civil interest, and hardly anything to buy except magnificent grapes
from the "Grapperies," even in November. We housed a battalion or
more in the man's series of greenhouses, and he responded--after
several more battalions had been quartered there--with a claim for
2,000,000 francs. He could not prove that a single pane of glass or
any of his vines had been broken, nor any grapes stolen, for indeed
they had not been, but he based his claim on the damage done to them
by tobacco smoke (which I always thought was particularly good for
them), and by the report of the big guns, which shattered the vines'
nerves so that he was sure they would n