But do not tell them that they are heroes.  They will deny it on the evidence of themselves as eyewitnesses of the action.  To remark that the K.O.P.F. are brave is like remarking that water flows down hill.  It is the business of the K.O.P.F. to be brave.  Why talk about it?

One of the three men hit was killed.  Well, everybody in the war rather expects to be killed.  The other two “got tickets to England,” as they say.  My lady will take the convalescents joy-riding in her car, and afterwards seat them in easy chairs, arranging the cushions with her own hands, and feed them slices of cold chicken in place of bully beef and strawberries and cream in place of ration marmalade.  Oh, my!  What hopes!

Mr. Atkins does not mind being a hero for the purposes of such treatment.  Then, with never a twinkle in his eye, he will tell my lady that he does not want to return to the front; he has had enough of it, he has.  My lady’s patriotism will be a trifle shocked, as Mr. Atkins knows it will be; and she will wonder if the “stick it” quality of the British soldier is weakening, as Mr. Atkins knows she will.  For he has more kinks in his mental equipment than mere nobility ever guesses, and he is having the time of his life in more respects than strawberries and cream.  What hopes!  Of course, he will return and hold on in the face of all that the Germans can give, without any pretence to bravery.

If you go as a stranger into the trenches on a sightseeing tour and says, “How are you?” and, “Are you going to Berlin?” and, “Are you comfortable?” etc., Tommy Atkins will say, “Yes, sir,” and “Very well, sir,” as becomes all polite regular soldier men; and you get to know him about as well as you know the members of a club if you are shown the library and dine at a corner table with a friend.

Spend the night in the trenches and you are taken into the family, into that very human family of soldier-dom in a quiet corner; and the old, care-free spirit of war, which some people thought had passed, is found to be no less alive in siege warfare than on a march of regulars on the Indian frontier or in the Philippines.  Gaiety and laughter and comradeship and “joshing” are here among men to whom wounds and death are a part of the game.  One may challenge high explosives with a smile, no less than ancient round shot.  Settle down behind the parapet, and the little incongruities of a trench, paltry without the intimacy of men and locality, make for humour no less than in a shop or a factory.

Under the parapet runs the tangle of barbed wire—­barbed wire from Switzerland to Belgium—­to welcome visitors from that direction, which, to say the least, would be an impolitic direction of approach for any stranger.

“All sightseers should come into the trenches from the rear,” says Mr. Atkins.  “Put it down in the guidebooks.”

Beyond the barbed wire in the open field the wheat which some farmer sowed before positions were established in this area is now in head, rippling with the breeze, making a golden sea up to the wall of sandbags which is the enemy’s line.  It was late June at its loveliest; no signs of war except the sound of our guns some distance away and an occasional sniper’s bullet.  One cracked past as I was looking through my glasses to see if there were any evidence of life in the German trenches.