Early next morning I discovered the French violinist in the court taking a variety of exercise, running, circling on the horizontal bar, and jumping over the forms and seats, in an effort doubtless to keep the muscles and sinews of his body as taut as his fiddle-strings. A “STIRRING TIME” There was one respect in which we could quite legitimately claim to be having a stirring time in camp, and that was as regards our ceaseless culinary operations. Recurrently as cook it was one’s duty to see that the members of one’s mess did not perish of starvation, surfeit, or ptomaine poisoning. Frequently with inadequate means as regards fuel, so that I have suggested to an officer endeavouring to thaw tinned sausage over burning paper that he might try Thermogene! Personally I achieved something of repute--or disrepute--for two dishes of my own contriving, one a mock Scottish haggis, and the other what I am afraid was little more than a mockery of English plum-pudding. It was through no reflection on our cooking, however, but simply for the reduction of a steadily increasing _embonpoint_ that one of our number undertook a voluntary five days’ fast. Besides being under ordinary conditions extremely good-natured by day, X had a mirthful habit of laughing in his sleep, the only case in a considerable experience of somnambulistic phenomena among soldiers during the war which I have yet encountered. In the early hours of the final morning of his fast he indeed laughed, but in a minor key, just a ghost of a guffaw, with a very apparent and pathetic tendency to merge into a sob. That morning he finished his fast and his breakfast almost simultaneously. In order that he should break the glad tidings gently, so to speak, to his famished and clamant stomach, we had specially reserved for him a tin of rice and milk, very happily designated “Amity.” This was followed up later in the day by a handful of stewed prunes, and he was soon once more in his right mind, if not so essentially clothed upon. He had, in fact, dropped just about one stone in weight in these five days of fasting. There was a suggestion that after the war some of us would be qualified to publish a cookery book: “Mrs. Beeton Beaten!” [Illustration: TWICE WOUNDED] * * * * * [Illustration: ORDERLY HANET--“LE PÈRE NOËL.”] VI AIR RAIDS AND OTHER ACTIVITIES Carlsruhe _Lager_ was located on the spot where a hundred people, mostly women and children, were killed during an air raid on Corpus Christi Day, 1916. A few days before the second anniversary our mess was at tea in the hut, when Father Daniels, the German priest, arrived in search of the Roman Catholic padre, and partook of a cup. Our talk was of raids, of which there had been a succession, and of _the_ air raid in particular.