select from his section the six men with the clearest voice and purest accent for training as telephonists. He did so, and they were duly tested--they all spoke a strange tongue which proved upon investigation to be the broadest Scotch! To this day that subaltern cannot understand why they were rejected and he himself loaded with opprobrious epithets. At one time we were in a position where the French wireless bulletin was transmitted to us in the original over the telephone. The state in which it reached us frequently defied translation, as may well be imagined. I once overheard a reference to the Hartmansweilerkopf coming through. "Are man's wily coughs _wot_? 'Ere, is this a patent medicine advertisement, or wot? Hullo, hullo! Goin' to spell it, are yer? Yes, haitch for 'energy, eye for what? Oh, eye for hass, r for rum, toc, emma, eye for hass, n for Nellie, esses, w for water--'ere, hullo, hullo! What the 'ell are yer gettin' at?" After that they took to sending it by Morse code on the buzzer, and things went along more smoothly, but even then it was a mutilated word that eventually reached me. From which it may be inferred that telephone messages do not always find the recipient in the same form in which they started, especially if they have to be repeated more than once during transmission. The story of the Loos refugees is a case in point. In addition to the complexities introduced by human failings, the telephone in the field suffers from aberrations of technical origin. Owing to the fact that the earth is used as the path for the return current in nearly every case, an instrument, if sufficiently sensitive, will pick up scraps of conversation between two stations speaking to one another, if the line joining them crosses or approaches to the line joining its own stations. In the case of the territory occupied by a modern army, wherein the chief means of communication is the telephone, extraordinary results are sometimes obtained. I have frequently slept with the receiver of a telephone close to my ear, and in the silence of the night have heard it whispering all sorts of fragmentary messages--"Hullo, hullo, brigade, are you brigade? brigade!--yes, and the old man was awfully fed up about it--brigade, brigade, hullo, can you hear me?--lengthen a hundred, fuse forty-two and a half!" and so on, _pianissimo_, throughout the night. Both sides have frequently obtained valuable information by putting specially sensitive telephones as near as possible to the opposing trenches and listening to the messages they picked up. It is believed that the apparently miraculous knowledge that the Germans at some parts of the line possessed as to the regiments opposed to them--they would often call out, "Hullo, Rutlandshires, are you in yet?" when a totally fresh battalion took over a section of trenches--was obtained by this method. Nor is this earth leakage the only way in which conversations are overheard. If