“House” is without doubt Tommy’s favorite game. It is really old-fashioned Lotto. It can be played with crowds which is what makes it the more interesting and popular. The game consists of numbered cards with a banker who holds a bag containing the numbers which run from one to ninety. As each number is called out the men with heads down and eyes on their cards cover their respective numbers as they are announced, using matches, bits of paper or stones as their covering pieces. The man who has his card filled first receives the whole of the “Kitty” less a small sum which the banker appropriates as his reward for supplying the cards and calling the numbers. “Bankers” start the games by barking in front of their trenches and there is always lively competition. The shout with all of them is the same, “Roll up! Roll up! Come along with your dough and souvenirs! Come up with your riches and princely treasures. Come up! Come up!” and occasionally a very honest one will add: “And go away skint” (broke). Announcing the numbers that he draws from the bag the banker has a language of his own. As, for instance, the number 1 is called “bottom of the house,” number 90 “top of the house” and when you hear the banker shout “clickety click,” put your covering piece on 66. It’s just a little sidelight I have given you here of the optimism and cheerfulness of the British soldier and my reason for presenting this phase of his type is to claim for him that men of such spirit can never be driven to the despondency which accepts defeat. CHAPTER XVII THE RAT IN THE NIGHT Butte de Walincourt! Butte de Walincourt on the way to Bapaume! What a great and thrilling story history will have to tell of Butte de Walincourt--merely a hill of one hundred and fifty feet altitude and round as the crown of a Derby hat! The days and days when the blood of fighting men streamed down both sides of that fiercely contested ridge. The Germans never fought more furiously than they did to hold Butte de Walincourt. They protected its flanks and held on to it against magnificent assaults. But more determined was the work of the South Africans and the Durham regiments of England in the battle for the round top of the Butte. Countless times they made the summit, countless times they were driven down again. Great squads of them were slaughtered, but they would come back the more sturdily, yes, even fanatically. It was a specific, concrete test of the endurance and courage of the Boche against the British and the British handsomely won. It was such an awful struggle, such a thrilling victory that in quick recognition the French Government has placed around historic Butte de Walincourt a high wired enclosure wherein after the war is to be built a superb memorial. Atop the round mound British commanders have already reverently erected a stone inscribed to the heroism of the South Africans and Durhams.