“I will!  I will strafe the chicken!” ‘Gott strafe England!’ Strafe has become a noun, a verb, an adjective, a cussword, and a term of greeting.  Soldier asks soldier how he is strafing to-day.  When the Germans are not called Boches they are called Strafers.  “Won’t you strafe a little for us?” Tommy sings out to the German trenches when they are close.  What hopes?  That gallant youngster of the K.O.P.F. in the midst of bantering advice succeeded in separating the meat from the bones without landing a leg in anybody’s lap or a wing in anybody’s eye.  Timid spectators who had hung back where he had dared might criticize his form, but they could not deny the efficiency of his execution.  He was appointed permanent strafer of all the fowls that came to table.

Everybody talked and joked about everything, from plays in London to the Germans.  There were arguments about favourite actors and military methods.  The sense of danger was as absent as if we had been dining in a summer garden.  It was the parents and relatives in pleasant English homes in fear of a dread telegram who were worrying, not the sons and brothers in danger.  Isn’t it better that way?  Would not the parents prefer it that way?  Wasn’t it the way of the ancestors in the scarlet coats and the Merrie England of their day?  With the elasticity of youth my hosts adapted themselves to circumstances.  In their lightheartedness they made war seem a keen sport.  They lived war for all it was worth.  If it gets on their nerves their efficiency is spoiled.  There is no room for a jumpy, excitable man in the trenches.  Youth’s resources defy monotony and death at the same time.

An expedition had been planned for that night.  A patrol the previous night had brought in word that the Germans had been sneaking up and piling sandbags in the wheatfield.  The plan was to slip out as soon as it was really dark with a machine-gun and a dozen men, get behind the Germans’ own sandbags, and give them a perfectly informal reception when they returned to go on with their work.

Before dinner, however, J------, who was to be the general of the
expedition, and his subordinates made a reconnaissance.  Two or
more officers or men always go out together on any trip of this kind in
that ticklish space between the trenches, where it is almost certain
death to be seen by the enemy.  If one is hit the other can help him
back.  If one survives he will bring back the result of his investigations.

J——­had his own ideas about comfort in trousers in the trench in summer.  He wore shorts with his knees bare.  When he had to do a “crawl” he unwound his puttees and wound them over his knees.  He and the others slipped over the parapet without attracting the attention of the enemy’s sharpshooters.  On hands and knees, like boy scouts playing Indians, they passed through a narrow avenue in the ugly barbed wire, and still not a shot at them.  A matter of the commonplace to the men in the trench held the spectator in suspense.  There was a fascination about the thing, too; that of the sporting chance, without a full realization that failure in this hide-and-seek game might mean a spray of bullets and death for these young men.