Of the programme itself, I have but the vaguest recollection, for the programmes are the least interesting part of these performances. The first item, I remember, was a dreadful sentimental song by Private Higgs which accident converted from comparative failure into howling success. Just as he was rendering the most affecting passage, Private Higgs stepped back too far, the cart--of the two-wheeled variety--overbalanced, and the sad singer was dropped down amongst the little pigs below, to the great joy of the crowd. Then came a Cockney humorist, who, in times of peace, was the owner of a fried fish and chip barrow in that home of low comedians--the East End. After him appeared Sergeant Andrews, disguised in one of Eliza's discarded skirts, with a wisp of straw on his head to represent a lady's hair. Some vulgar song he sang in a shrill, falsetto voice that caused great dismay among the pigs, as yet unused to the vagaries of the British soldier. After the interval, during which the audience _en masse_ made a pilgrimage to Eliza's back door to buy beer at a penny a glass, there came the usual mixture of the vulgar and the sentimental, for nothing on earth is more sentimental than a soldier. There was the inevitable "Beautiful Picture in a Beautiful Golden Frame," and a recitation in Yiddish which was well applauded simply because no man had any idea what it was about. The Sergeant-Major gave a very creditable rendering of "Loch Lomond" in a voice that would terrify a recruit, and we finished up the evening with a song requesting a certain naughty boy to hold out his hand, which was shouted by everyone with so much vigour that one wondered how it was the men could still sing "God save the King" when the time came. And far into the night, when the farmyard lay still and ghostly, and the pigs had gone off to bed, we still sat and talked in the "Officers' Mess," and recalled jokes of George Robey and Harry Tate, or hummed over the tunes we had heard at the last Queen's Hall concert. As the Captain had said, we wanted "taking out of ourselves," and it had just needed an impromptu concert in an old Flemish barn to do it. XXIII THE "STRAFE" THAT FAILED There is a certain battery in France where the name of Archibald Smith brings a scowl to every brow and an oath to every lip. The Battery Major still crimsons with wrath at the thought of him, and the Observing Officer remembers bitterly the long, uncomfortable hours he spent, perched up in a tree a hundred yards or so from the German lines. And this is how Archibald Smith was the unwitting cause of so much anger to the battery, and the saver of many a German life. One morning shortly before dawn the Commanding Officer of an infantry regiment was wading down a communicating trench, when he met an artillery officer, accompanied by three men with a big roll of telephone wire. "Hullo, what are you doing at this hour?" he asked.