The sign on a board fastened against the earth wall read, “No thoroughfare!” The soldier-cook, with a fork in his hand, his sleeves rolled up, his shirt open at his tanned throat, looked formidable.  He was preoccupied; he was at close quarters roasting a chicken over a small stove.  Yes, they have cook-stoves in the trenches.  Why not?  The line had been in the same position for six months.

“Little by little we improve our happy home,” said the cook.

The latest acquisition was a lace curtain for the officers’ mess hall, bought at a shop in the nearest town.

When the cook was inside his kitchen there was no room to spill anything on the floor.  The kitchen was about three feet square, with boarded walls, and a roof covered with tar paper and a layer of earth set level with the trench parapet.  The chicken roasted and the frying potatoes sizzled as an occasional bullet passed overhead, even as flies buzz about the screen door when Mary is making cakes for tea.

The officers’ mess hall, next to the kitchen and built in the same fashion, had some boards nailed on posts sunk in the ground for a table, which was proof against tipping when you climbed over it or squeezed around it to your place.  The chairs were rifle-ammunition boxes, whose contents had been emptied with individual care, bullet by bullet, at the Germans in the trench on the other side of the wheatfield.  Dinner was at nine in the evening, when it was still twilight in the longest days of the year in this region.  The hour fits in with trench routine, when night is the time to be on guard and you sleep by day.  Breakfast comes at nine in the morning.  I was invited to help eat the chicken and to spend the night.

Now, the general commanding the brigade who accompanied me to the trenches had been hit twice.  So had the colonel, a man about forty.  From forty, ages among the regimental officers dropped into the twenties.

Many of the older men who started in the war had been killed, or were back in England wounded, or had been promoted to other commands where their experience was more useful.  To youth, life is sweet and danger is life.  The oldest of the officers of the proud old K.O.P.F. who gathered for dinner was about twenty-five, though when he assumed an air of authority he seemed to be forty.  It was not right to ask the youngest his age.  Parenthetically, let it be said that he is trying to start a moustache.  They had come fresh from Sandhurst to swift tuition in gruelling, incessant warfare.

“Has anyone asked him it yet?” one inquired, referring to some question to the guest.

“Not yet?  Then all together:  When do you think that the war will be over?”

It was the eternal question of the trenches, the army, and the world.  We had it over with before the soldier-cook brought on the roast chicken, which was received with a befitting chorus of approbation.

Who would carve?  Who knew how to carve?  Modesty passed the honour to her neighbour, till a brave man said: