He finished his remark with a yell, for an enterprising wasp had flown the rout and stung the speaker on the nose. Then the insect made the round of the breakfast party. A few fled instantly and escaped, others took to their heels at the first sting, but the man who waited to pick up the sultana cake and the tin of sardines had all the colours of a Board School map on his face for weeks afterwards. A narrow, crooked trench infested by furious wasps is not a healthy locality. The insects outmanoeuvred the soldiers at every turn. The men turned the third buttress feeling that they had escaped their persecutors only to find that the insects had crossed the top of the traverse and were in waiting round the corner. As a man runs a trench is a weary pathway, as a wasp flies it presents no difficulties. The place was in an uproar. The wasps had attacked on both sides, some drove the men left, others flew after them on the right. In every bay their numbers seemed to have increased; at the traverse turning the soldiers eluded them for a moment only to encounter them in the next bay. A number of men sought safety in the dugouts; the wasps followed and drove them out into the perilous trench again. When the first officer was met he stood for a moment with one foot in the trench, one on the firestep, and stared in astonishment. His wonderment was short-lived. A wasp announced itself when it alighted on his ear, and immediately the subaltern became one with the rout. Spudhole was now wounded in several places. The morning had been fine, and like the rest of his mates, he was in shirt-sleeves fighting order. "I've copped a sting again," he yelled. "That's umpty eleven times. I always said that I didn't 'old with a war like this un. Bombs and bullets, whizz-bangs and pip-squeaks and now these 'ere God-forsaken wopses.... That's anuver one, a blurry Boche. 'E sniped me from the rim of me cap.... God! Platoons of 'em.... Oh! damn! That un took me at the rear where I should 'ave a patch on me trousers...." Again a bay was entered where another merry party was sitting down to breakfast; a gargantuan spread of fried bacon, toast and trench tea. A platoon officer was sharing in the meal. He was a stout good-natured man with a bald head, baby-pink and shiny. The advance party of wasps could not miss the head; the pests came to a halt on it, and being nasty, they stung when they alighted. The officer yelled several words which the men had never noticed in his vocabulary before. Groping frantically for his hat, which, as often happens in a crisis, was nowhere to be found, he overturned the brazier, the toast-rack, and several canteens of tea, scalding the feet of a number of men who were seated on the firestep.... The soldiers were up in an instant and raced off along the trench. Rifles, equipment and ammunition were flung down on the floor and trampled into the clay and rubble.