I had passed that cemetery with its fresh wooden crosses on my way to the trench. These tender-hearted soldiers who joked with death had placed flowers on the graves of fallen comrades and bought elaborate French funeral wreaths with their meagre pay--which is another side of Mr. Thomas Atkins. There is sentiment in him. Yes, he’s loaded with sentiment, but not for the movies. “Keep your head down there, Eames!” called a corporal. “I don’t want to be taking an inventory of your kit.” Eames did not even realise that his head was above the parapet. The hardest thing to teach a soldier is not to expose himself. Officers keep iterating warnings and then forget to practise what they preach. That morning a soldier had been shot through the heart and arm sideways back of the trench. He had lain down unnoticed for a nap in the sun, it was supposed. When he awoke, presumably he sat up and yawned and Herr Schmidt, from some platform in a tree, had a bloody reward for his patience. The next morning I saw the British take their revenge. Some German who thought that he could not be seen in the mist of dawn was walking along the German parapet. What hopes! Four or five men took careful aim and fired. That dim figure collapsed in a way that was convincing. As I swept the line of German trenches with the glasses, I saw a wisp of a flag clinging to its pole in the still air far down to the left. Flags are as unusual above trenches as men standing up in full view of the enemy. Then a breeze caught the folds of the flag and I saw that it was the tricolour of France. “A _Boche_ joke!” Tommy explained. “Probably they are hating the French to-day?” “No, it’s been there for some days. They want us to shoot at the flag of our ally. They’d get a laugh out of that--a regular Boche notion of humour.” “If it were a German flag?” I suggested. “What hopes! We’d make it into a lace curtain!” Even the guns had ceased firing. The birds in their evensong had all the war to themselves. It was difficult to believe that if you stood on top of the parapet anybody would shoot at you; no, not even if you walked down the road that ran through the wheat-field, everything was so peaceful. One grew sceptical of there being any Germans in the trenches opposite. “There are three or four sharpshooters and a fat old _Boche_ professor in spectacles, who moves a machine gun up and down for a bluff,” said a soldier, and another corrected him: “No, the old professor’s the one that walks along at night sending up flares!” “Munching K.K. bread with his false teeth!” “And singing the hymn of hate!” Thus the talk ran on in the quiet of evening, till we heard a concussion and a quarter of a mile away, behind a screen of trees, a pillar of smoke rose to the height of two or three hundred feet. “A mine!” “In front of the --th brigade!” “Ours or the _Boches’_?” “Ours, from the way the smoke went--our fuse!” “No, theirs!”