benefit that the enemy must have been shocked with surprise.
One young marine was bomb-slinging for four hours, and grinned at the
prodigious memory as though he had had the time of his life. Another
confessed to me that he preferred rifle-grenades, which he fired off all
night until the dawn. There was no sleep in the dugouts, and every hour
was a long thrill.

"I don't mind saying," said a petty officer who had fought in several
naval actions during the war and is a man of mark, "that I had a fair
fright when I was doing duty on the fire-step. 'I suppose I've got to
look through a periscope,' I said. 'Not you,' said the sergeant. 'At
night you puts your head over the parapet.' So over the parapet I put my
head, and presently I saw something moving between the lines. My rifle
began to shake. Germans! Moving, sure enough, over the open ground. I
fixed bayonet and prepared for an attack... But I'm blessed if it wasn't
a swarm of rats!"

The soldiers were glad to show Jack the way about the trenches, and some
of them played up a little audaciously, as, for instance, when a young
fellow sat on the top of the parapet at dawn.

"Come up and have a look, Jack," he said to one of the bluejackets.

"Not in these trousers, old mate!" said that young man.

"All as cool as cucumbers," said a petty officer, "and take the
discomforts of trench life as cheerily as any men could. It's marvelous.
Good luck to them in the new year!"

* * *

Behind the lines there was banqueting by men who were mostly doomed
to die, and I joined a crowd of them in a hall at Lillers on that
New-Year's day.

They were the heroes of Loos--or some of them--Camerons and Seaforths,
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, Gordons and King's Own Scottish
Borderers, who, with the London men, were first on Hill 70 and away
to the Cite St.-Auguste. They left many comrades there, and their
battalions have been filled up with new drafts--of the same type as
themselves and of the same grit--but that day no ghost of grief, no dark
shadow of gloom, was upon any of the faces upon which I looked round
a festive board in a long, French hall, to which their wounded came in
those days of the September battle.

There were young men there from the Scottish universities and from
Highland farms, sitting shoulder to shoulder in a jolly comradeship
which burst into song between every mouthful of the feast. On the
platform above the banqueting-board a piper was playing, when