Early in the evening a regiment on our right broke into a busy fusillade at some fancied movement of the enemy.  In trench talk that is getting “jumpy.”  The Germans in front roared out their contempt in a chorus of guying laughter.  Toward morning, these same Germans also became “jumpy” and began tearing the air with bullets, firing against nothing but the blackness of night.  Tommy Atkins only made some characteristic comments; for he is a quiet fellow, except when he is played on the music-hall stage.  Possibly he feels the inconsistency of laughter when you are killing human beings; for, as his officers say, he is temperamental and never goes to the trouble of analysing his emotions.  A very real person and a good deal of a philosopher is Mr. Atkins, Britain’s professional fighting man, who was the only kind of fighting man she had ready for the war.

Any small boy who had never had enough fireworks in his life might be given a job in the German trenches, with the privilege of firing flares till he fell asleep from exhaustion.  All night they were going, with the regularity of clockwork.  The only ones sent up from our side that night were shot in order that I might get a better view of the German dead.

You know how water lies in the low places on the ground after a heavy rain.  Well, the patches of dead were like that, and dark in the spots where they were very thick—­dark as with the darkness of deeper water.  There were also irregular tongues of dead and scattered dead, with arms outstretched or under them as they fell, and faces white even in the reddish glare of the rockets and turned toward you in the charge that failed under the withering blasts of machine-guns, ripping out two or three hundred shots a minute, and well-aimed rifle-bullets, each bullet getting its man.  Threatening that charge would have seemed to a recruit, but measured and calculated in certainty of failure in the minds of veteran defenders, who knew that the wheat could not stand before their mowers.  Man’s flesh is soft and a bullet is hard and travels fast.

One bit of satire which Tommy sent across the field covered with its burden of slaughter to the Germans who are given to song, ought to have gone home.  It was:  “Why don’t you stop singing and bury your dead?” But the Germans, having given no armistice in other times when British dead lay before the trenches, asked for none here.  The dead were nearer to the British than to the Germans.  The discomfort would be in British and not German nostrils.  And the dead cannot fight; they can help no more to win victory for the Fatherland; and the time is A.D. 1915.  Two or three thousand German dead altogether, perhaps—­not many out of the Kaiser’s millions.  Yet they seemed a great many to one who saw them lying there.