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 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, 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 wheatfield, 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!" Our colonel telephoned down to know if we knew whose mine it was, which was the question we wanted to ask him. The guns from both sides became busy under the column of smoke. Oh, yes, there were Germans in the trenches which had appeared vacant. Their shots and ours merged in the hissing medley of a tempest. "Not enough guns--not enough noise for an attack!" said experienced Tommy, who knew what an attack was like. The commander of the adjoining brigade telephoned to the division commander, who passed the word through to our colonel, who passed it to us that the mine was German and had burst thirty yards short of the British trench.