This imperturbable young man with the shaven head and the yellow moustache, whose dinner is being continually interrupted by gruff voices issuing from the darkness at the door of the dug-out, “Can I speak to the Captain?” “A message for the Captain!” “About those blankets for the men, sir ...” is responsible for the safety of this stretch of trench and its tenants. He transacts his business through the door of the dug-out and eats his dinner at the same time, always tranquilly. The hole in the back of his tunic is a souvenir of a piece of high-explosive shell in the shoulder, and the cut in the knee of his trousers is due to the same cause. A boy with yellow hair and pink cheeks, who is talking telescopic rifles with the doctor, is Lord of the Hate Squad--in other words, in charge of the snipers. Only that afternoon I had seen him, with a companion, amid bullets snapping viciously against a ruined wall, patiently waiting for a certain sniping Hun whose habitat was in a tree. He had not got him that day, but the Hate Squad had their eye on the sniper, and sooner or later his number would go up. A burst of laughter from the other end of the table greets a story told with infinite gusto by the machine-gun officer, a phlegmatic young man with the ribbon of the Military Cross on his tunic. He knows German well, and one of his amusements is to revile the Germans in their own tongue. He is recounting some of the epithets he applies to them. Our army in the field has managed to scrape together a whole vocabulary of trench slang. It is a strange medley of English, French, and German. That immortal phrase “Gott strafe England” has given to trench slang “strafing” as a substantive, and “to straf” as a verb. As you have probably already gathered from reading soldiers’ letters in the newspapers, to be “strafed” is to be bombarded by the enemy--in short, to suffer in any way at the hands of the Hun. The morning and evening “straf” is equivalent to the morning and evening “frightfulness” or “hate,” the liveliness with which the German guns issue in the day and march it out at its close. The Germans apply the words “_Morgengruss_” (morning greeting) and “_Abendsegen_” (evening benediction) to these periodical outbursts from our side. “Hate,” used in this sense, undoubtedly owes its origin to that amusing sketch in _Punch_, showing a German family indulging in its “morning hate.” This clever cartoon had an immense vogue at the front, and I have seen it frequently hanging up on the walls of dug-outs and billets. To be “crumped”--another expression often heard in the trenches--is to be bombarded with heavy howitzer shells, an onomatopœic word. To be “archied”--a Royal Flying Corps phrase--is to be shelled by anti-aircraft guns, which are universally known as “Archibalds” or “Archies.”