Five miles away, Lens, its church spires adrift in eddies of smoke, appeared very unconscious of it all. Just showing on the horizon was Douai, and I wondered what forests of death lay waiting between those Lens churches and the Douai outlines where the ground was sunken and mysterious under the haze. Here, then, was the panorama of battle. Never a man in sight, but the entire earth goaded by some vast invisible force. Clots of smoke of varying colors arrived from nowhere, died away, or were smudged out by other clots. A big black pall hung over Givenchy like the sounding-board over a cathedral pulpit. A little farther on the village of Angres seemed palisaded with points of flame. Away to the right the long, straight road from Lens to Arras showed clear and strong without a speck of life upon it. No life anywhere, no human thing moving. And yet one believed that under a thin crust of earth the whole forces of Europe were struggling and throwing up sound. Among all the combatants there is a desire for peace, says Mr. Flower, who found a striking example of the sentiment of the _Boche_ in what had been the crypt of the Bapaume cathedral. He writes: I saw scores of skulls of those who were dead many decades before the war rolled over Europe, and on the skull of one I saw scribbled in indelible pencil: “_Dass der Friede kommen mag_” (“Hurry up, Peace.”)—_Otto Trübner._ Now, Otto Trübner may be a very average representative of his type. And maybe Otto Trübner’s head now bears a passing likeness to the skull he scribbled on in vandal fashion before he evacuated Bapaume. But whether or no, he is, metaphorically speaking, a straw which shows the play of the wind. SOME STUNT—TRY IT Sergeant (drilling awkward squad)—“Company! Attention company, lift up your left leg and hold it straight out in front of you!” One of the squad held up his right leg by mistake. This brought his right-hand companion’s left leg and his own right leg close together. The officer, seeing this, exclaimed angrily: “And who is that blooming galoot over there holding up both legs?” WHEN THE HUN QUIT SMOKING Tommy I—“That’s a top-hole pipe, Jerry. Where d’ye get it?” Tommy II—“One of them German Huns tried to take me prisoner an’ I in’erited it from ’im.” WHEN “ACE” LUFBERY BAGGED NO. 13