My remaining trench service with the Second Battalion this autumn was uneventful. There was no excitement left in patrolling, no horror in the continual experience of death. The single recordable incident I recall was one of purely technical interest, a new method that an officer named Owen and myself invented for dealing with machine-guns firing at night. The method was to give each sentry a piece of string about a yard long, with a cartridge tied at each end; when the machine-gun started firing, sentries who were furthest from the fire would stretch the string in the direction of the machine-gun and peg it down with the points of the cartridges. This gave a pretty accurate line on the machine-gun. When we had about thirty or more of these lines taken on a single machine-gun we fixed rifles as accurately as possible along them and waited for it; as soon as it started we opened five rounds rapid. This gave a close concentration of fire and no element of nervousness could disturb the aim, the rifles being secured between sandbags. Divisional headquarters asked us for a report of the method. There was a daily exchange of courtesies between our machine-guns and the Germans’ at stand-to; by removing cartridges from the ammunition belt it was possible to rap out the rhythm of the familiar call: ‘Me—et me do—wn in Pi—cca-di—ll—y,’ to which the Germans would reply, though in slower tempo, because our guns were faster than theirs: ‘Se—e you da—mned to He—ll first.’ It was late in this October that I was sent a press-cutting from _John Bull_. Horatio Bottomley, the editor, was protesting against the unequal treatment for criminal offences meted out to commoners and aristocrats. A young man, he said, convicted in the police-court of a criminal offence was merely bound over and put in the care of a physician—because he was the grandson of an earl! An offender not belonging to the influential classes would have been given three months without the option of a fine. The article described in some detail how Dick, a sixteen-year old boy, had made ‘a certain proposal’ to a corporal in a Canadian regiment stationed near ‘Charterhouse College,’ and how the corporal had very properly given him in charge of the police. This news was nearly the end of me. I decided that Dick had been driven out of his mind by the war. There was madness in the family, I knew; he had once shown me a letter from his grandfather scrawled in circles all over the page. It would be easy to think of him as dead.