A whole vocabulary has grown up about the guns which are playing such a rôle in this war. “Gunning” is freely used as a synonym for “shelling”; the heavy guns are, _tout court_, “the heavies”; the howitzers are the “hows.” There is a wild and picturesque crop of nicknames to denote the different kinds of guns and shells. Thus, our heaviest howitzer is known as “Grandmother” or “Grandma,” while the next below it in size is “Mother.” A certain German long-range naval gun, whose shells have the peculiarity of bursting before you hear them arrive, is known as “Percy.” German high-explosive shrapnel shells are “white hopes” or “white swans.” “Jack Johnsons,” “Black Marias,” and “coal-boxes” are used rather indiscriminately for different kinds of heavy shells, while “whizz-bangs,” the small 15-pounder shell thrown by a mountain-gun, are also called “pip-squeaks.” The men in the firing-line got so free with their nicknames for shells in official reports at one time that a list of officially recognized and distinctive nicknames for German shells was drawn up and issued for use by some divisions. From the French trench slang derives one or two expressions. “To function” (_fonctionner_) is one. A man “functions” as liaison officer, a trench-pump will not “function.” “_Dégommer_” is often used to denote the action of relieving an officer of his command. It is, of course, pure French slang, and is invariably used in this sense in the French Army. This word has a curious derivation. It was, I believe, first applied by the _Humanité_ in its old sledgehammer days under the late Jean Jaures, to denote Aristide Briand, most fiercely hated of all French Ministers because, at the outset of his career, he was in the ranks of those revolutionary Socialists whom he had to combat so fiercely when in office. All public men who came under the ban of the _Humanité_ had their nicknames, and were never referred to by anything else. Thus M. Lépine, the late Prefect of Police of Paris, was spoken of as _le sinistre gnome_, M. Clemenceau as _Le Tigre_, and M. Briand, after his fall from power as the result of his suppression of the railway strike, as _Le Dégommé_--“the ungummed one,” the innuendo being that he had clung to office until he was forcibly torn from power. Talk at the trench mess, of course, principally turns round such trench topics as the men and their caprices, the date of relief, leave. There is “grousing” about the slowness of promotion, about the Mentions in Despatches. But there is no gloom. It is an eternal wonder to me that the officers in the trenches are so consistently cheerful. Neither death nor danger depresses their spirits; the monotony does not make them despondent. They do not hide the fact that they hate shell-fire, or that they could contemplate a more agreeable existence than living in a ditch in Flanders. Only they realize that they have a job to do, and they do it. And they will go on doing it until their work is done.