A little gruesome--true! Not in the trenches--true, too! Where all is satire, no incongruity seems out of place. Life plays in and out with death; they intermingle; they look each other in the face and say, “I know you. We dwell together. Let us smile when we may, at what we may, to hide the character of our comradeship; for to-morrow--” Only half an hour before one of the officers had been shot through the head by a sniper. He was a popular officer. The others had messed with him and marched with him and known him in the fulness of affection of comradeship in arms and dangers shared. A heartbreak for some home in England. No one dwelt on the incident. What was there to say? The trembling lip, trembling in spite of itself, was the only outward sign of the depth of feeling that words could not reflect, at tea in the dugout. The subject was changed to something about the living. One must carry on cheerfully; one must be on the alert; one must play his part serenely, unflinchingly, for the sake of the nerves around him and for his own sake. Such fortitude becomes automatic, it would seem. Please, I must not hesitate about having a slice of cake. They managed cake without any difficulty up there in the trenches. And who if not men in the trenches was entitled to cake, I should like to know? “It was here that he was hit,” another officer said, as we moved on in the trench. “He was saying that the sandbags were a little weak there and a bullet might go through and catch a man, who thought himself safely under cover as he walked along. He had started to fix the sandbags himself when he got it. The bullet came right through the top of one of the bags in front of him.” A bullet makes the merciful wound; and a bullet through the head is a simple way of going. The bad wounds come mostly from shells; but there is something about seeing any one hit by a sniper which is more horrible. It is a cold-blooded kind of killing, more suggestive of murder, this single shot from a sharpshooter waiting as patiently as a cat for a mouse, aimed definitely to take the life of one man. Again we move on in that narrow cut of earth with its waiting soldiers, which the world knows so well from reading tours of the trenches. No one not on watch might show his head on an afternoon like this. The men were prisoners between those walls of earth; not even spectators of what the guns were doing; simply moles. They took it all as a part of the day’s work, with that singular, redoubtable combination of British phlegm and cheerfulness.