The officers’ mess hall, next to the kitchen and built in the same fashion, had some boards nailed on posts sunk in the ground for a table, which was proof against tipping when you climbed over it or squeezed around it to your place. The chairs were rifle-ammunition boxes, whose contents had been emptied with individual care, bullet by bullet, at the Germans in the trench on the other side of the wheat-field. Dinner was at nine in the evening, when it was still twilight in the longest day of the year in this region. The hour fits in with trench routine, when night is the time to be on guard and you sleep by day. Breakfast comes at nine in the morning. I was invited to help eat the chicken and to spend the night. Now, the general commanding the brigade who accompanied me to the trenches had been hit twice. So had the colonel, a man about forty. From forty, ages among the regimental officers dropped into the twenties. Many of the older men who started in the war had been killed, or were back in England wounded, or had been promoted to other commands where their experience was more useful. To youth, life is sweet and danger is life. The oldest of the officers of the proud old K. O. P. F. who gathered for dinner was about twenty-five, though when he assumed an air of authority he seemed about forty. It was not right to ask the youngest his age. Parenthetically, let it be said that he is trying to start a moustache. They had come fresh from Sandhurst to swift tuition in gruelling, incessant warfare. “Has any one asked him it yet?” one inquired, referring to some question to the guest. “Not yet? Then all together: When do you think that the war will be over?” It was the eternal question of the trenches, the army and the world. We had it over with before the soldier cook brought on the roast chicken, which was received with a befitting chorus of approbation: Who would carve? Who knew how to carve? Modesty passed the honour to its neighbour, till a brave man said: “I will! I will _strafe_ the chicken!” _Gott strafe England!_ _Strafe_ has become a noun, a verb, an adjective, a cussword, and a term of greeting. Soldier asks soldier how he is strafing to-day. When the Germans are not called _Boches_ they are called Strafers. “Won’t you strafe a little for us?” Tommy sings out to the German trenches when they are close. What hopes! That gallant youngster of the K. O. P. F. in the midst of bantering advice succeeded in separating the meat from the bones without landing a leg in anybody’s lap or a wing in anybody’s eye. Timid spectators who had hung back where he had dared might criticise his form, but they could not deny the efficiency of his execution. He was appointed permanent “strafer” of all the fowls that came to table.