Something that is noticed by all who have served at the front is the drollery of the men in dangerous or uncomfortable surroundings. Sometimes it is good-natured, sometimes ill-tempered and critical, but it is ever present. One cannot but believe that the wag of the company is better than a tonic to the men, in fact is almost as good a pick-me-up as the rum ration. Who has not felt the benefit of a good laugh? Who has not seen a well-developed sense of humor save a difficult situation, or at least alleviate it? With Tommy the humor crops out in the most unexpected situations. Under circumstances in which the ordinary man would turn ghastly pale, Tommy cracks a joke. Crossing an open space toward a railway embankment I was fifty yards or so from a culvert through which I had intended passing, when a soldier reached it. He was carrying a load on his back, and was sucking on a pipe, his head bowed in thought. A whizz bang shrieked by me, and struck just at the entrance to the culvert, missing him only by inches. Fortunately it banged into the earth four or five feet beyond his position at the moment, so that the fragments spread from him, not towards him. He had escaped death by a hairbreadth. He stopped in his path, took his pipe from his mouth, raised his head and looked with a surprised air at the hole in the ground made by the bursting shell. His only comment was uttered in a slow voice: "Well, I'll--be--jiggered!" And putting his pipe back into his mouth, he coolly resumed his walk and his meditation, without altering his course by one inch. Thus do men come to accept narrow escapes from death as a matter of course, where such escapes are as common as is plum jam in the rations. -------- The men are plodding along in thick tenacious mud, carrying sixty-pound trench mortars, each foot with its accumulated mud weighing at least twenty pounds, and feeling as if it weighed a ton. They are sweating, and blowing, and tired. They halt for a rest and lean up against the wet, muddy wall of the trench, carelessly chucking the heavy mortars into the mud. Then the wag begins by cursing the bally war, consigning the officers to perdition, condemning the food as unfit for "villyuns," and wishing the Kaiser "wuz in 'ell." "And the blighters hexpect hus to stand an' face the henemy. An' ye betcher life we'll do it too, coz we couldn't run if we want to: we're stuck in the mud!" A smile passes along the tired faces; their rest is over, and more or less rejuvenated, they take up their burdens and pass on. --------