A Highlander writes home from the war to a friend that things are going so badly with "our dear old chum Wilhelm" that "I've bet X---- a new hat that I'll be home by Christmas." Bets are common in the trenches. Gunners wager about the number of their hits, riflemen on the number of misses by the enemy. A soldier told a correspondent that they gambled in the trenches on the next man to be killed. "We'd get up a little sweepstake, draw names and--wait! There was always a favourite. I held that not altogether enviable position three times. But I disappointed my backers! One day I noticed that a fellow a few yards away kept on turning round to look at me. He did it so often that at last I realised with a bit of a shock that he had drawn me in the sweepstake. He was waiting to see me tumble down with a bullet through me. It would have been worth 15s. to him." Here is an extract from a letter: "I received your request for a German helmet off a head I had knocked over. Will try to get you a German's ear or some other portable article. I am very fit and well, and trying to force British culture on the Germans. I think now we have put a spoke in the Kaiser's wheel for good, and I am proud to think that I have been a small splinter in the spoke." It is unlawful to trade with the enemy, but our soldiers consider that it is legitimate to play practical jokes on the Germans when their trenches are near ours, as is sometimes the case. A beetroot field was near, so our men carved caricatures of the Kaiser on beetroot and inside put reports of the Allies' successes in East and West. The "busts" were then adroitly hurled into the German trenches. This sort of pleasantry frequently led to furious abuse and the liberal exchange of bullets, generally harmless. At one place the German trenches were advanced to within sixty yards of the British first line of trenches. The Germans had fixed up barbed wire entanglements, to which they attached here and there a number of empty jam tins, arranged in couples in such a way that on the slightest disturbance they were bound to jangle. Crawling very cautiously out in the dead of night, one of our men fastened the end of a ball of string to the nearest point of the barbed wire, and let the string run out as he crawled no less cautiously back again. The first tug at the string when he had regained the shelter of the British trench started a faint jangling, which startled the German sentries. The next produced a fusilade; and the Germans blazed away at the clattering jam tins, while the British roared with laughter.