y caught the
glint of his red cloak.

Some of the soldiers had the same idea. In the front-line trench a small
group of Yorkshire lads were chaffing one another.

"Going to hang your boots up outside the dugout?" asked a lad, grinning
down at an enormous pair of waders belonging to a comrade.

"Likely, ain't it?" said the other boy. "Father Christmas would be a
bloody fool to come out here... They'd be full of water in the morning."

"You'll get some presents," I said. "They haven't forgotten you at
home."

At that word "home" the boy flushed and something went soft in his eyes
for a moment. In spite of his steel helmet and mud-stained uniform, he
was a girlish-looking fellow--perhaps that was why his comrades were
chaffing him--and I fancy the thought of Christmas made him yearn back
to some village in Yorkshire.

Most of the other men with whom I spoke treated the idea of Christmas
with contemptuous irony.

"A happy Christmas!" said one of them, with a laugh. "Plenty of crackers
about this year! Tom Smith ain't in it."

"And I hope we're going to give the Boches some Christmas presents,"
said another. "They deserve it, I don't think!"

"No truce this year?" I asked.

"A truce?... We're not going to allow any monkey--tricks on the
parapets. To hell with Christmas charity and all that tosh. We've got to
get on with the war. That's my motto."

Other men said: "We wouldn't mind a holiday. We're fed up to the neck
with all this muck."

The war did not stop, although it was Christmas Eve, and the only carol
I heard in the trenches was the loud, deep chant of the guns on both
sides, and the shrill soprano of whistling shells, and the rattle on the
keyboards of machine-guns. The enemy was putting more shells into a bit
of trench in revenge for a raid. To the left some shrapnel shells were
bursting, and behind the lines our "heavies" were busily at work firing
at long range.

"On earth peace, good-will toward men."

The message was spoken at many a little service on both sides of that
long line where great armies were entrenched with their death-machines,
and the riddle of life and faith was rung out by the Christmas bells
which came clashing on the rain-swept wind, with the reverberation of
great guns.

Through the night our men in the trenches stood in their waders, and
the dawn of Christmas Day was greeted, not by angelic songs, but by the
splutter of rifle-bullets all along the line.

VI

Th