Next time you pass a Signaller’s Dug-out peep inside.  You will find it occupied by a coke brazier, emitting large quantities of carbon monoxide, and an untidy gentleman in khaki, with a blue-and-white device upon his shoulder-straps, who is humped over a small black instrument, luxuriating in a “frowst” most indescribable.  He is reading a back number of a rural Scottish newspaper which you never heard of.  Occasionally, in response to a faint buzz, he takes up his transmitter and indulges in an unintelligible altercation with a person unseen.  You need feel no surprise if he is wearing the ribbon of the Distinguished Conduct Medal.

VII

PASTURES NEW

I

The outstanding feature of to-day’s intelligence is that spring is coming—­has come, in fact.

It arrived with a bump.  March entered upon its second week with seven degrees of frost and four inches of snow.  We said what was natural and inevitable to the occasion, wrapped our coats of skins more firmly round us, and made a point of attending punctually when the rum ration was issued.

Forty-eight hours later winter had disappeared.  The sun was blazing in a cloudless sky.  Aeroplanes were battling for photographic rights overhead; the brown earth beneath our feet was putting forth its first blades of tender green.  The muck-heap outside our rest-billet displayed unmistakable signs of upheaval from its winter sleep.  Primroses appeared in Bunghole Wood; larks soared up into the sky above No Man’s Land, making music for the just and the unjust.  Snipers, smiling cheerfully over the improved atmospheric conditions, polished up their telescopic sights.  The artillery on each side hailed the birth of yet another season of fruitfulness and natural increase with some more than usually enthusiastic essays in mutual extermination.  Half the Mess caught colds in their heads.

Frankly, we are not sorry to see the end of winter.  Caesar, when he had concluded his summer campaign, went into winter quarters.  Caesar, as Colonel Kemp once huskily remarked, knew something!

Still, each man to his taste.  Corporal Mucklewame, for one, greatly prefers winter to summer.

“In the winter,” he points out to Sergeant M’Snape, “a body can breathe withoot swallowing a wheen bluebottles and bum-bees.  A body can aye streitch himself doon under a tree for a bit sleep withoot getting wasps and wee beasties crawling up inside his kilt, and puddocks craw-crawing in his ear!  A body can keep himself frae sweitin’—­”

“He can that!” assents M’Snape, whose spare frame is more vulnerable to the icy breeze than that of the stout corporal.

However, the balance of public opinion is against Mucklewame.  Most of us are unfeignedly glad to feel the warmth of the sun again.  That working-party, filling sandbags just behind the machine-gun emplacement, are actually singing.  Spring gets into the blood, even in this stricken land.  The Boche over the way resents our efforts at harmony.