now.  There have been atrocities, gas, unforgettable things.  Everything is harder.  Our people are inclined now to laugh at a man who gets hit, and to be annoyed at a man with a troublesome wound.  The other day, they say, there was a big dead German outside the Essex trenches.  He became a nuisance, and he was dragged in and taken behind the line and buried.  After he was buried, a kindly soul was putting a board over him with ‘Somebody’s Fritz’ on it, when a shell burst close by.  It blew the man with the board a dozen yards and wounded him, and it restored Fritz to the open air.  He was lifted clean out.  He flew head over heels like a windmill.  This was regarded as a tremendous joke against the men who had been at the pains of burying him.  For a time nobody else would touch Fritz, who was now some yards behind his original grave.  Then as he got worse and worse he was buried again by some devoted sanitarians, and this time the inscription was ’Somebody’s Fritz.  R.I.P.’  And as luck would have it, he was spun up again.  In pieces.  The trench howled with laughter and cries of ‘Good old Fritz!’ ’This isn’t the Resurrection, Fritz.’...

“Another thing that appeals to the sunny humour of the trenches as a really delicious practical joke is the trick of the fuses.  We have two kinds of fuse, a slow-burning fuse such as is used for hand-grenades and such-like things, a sort of yard-a-minute fuse, and a rapid fuse that goes a hundred yards a second—­for firing mines and so on.  The latter is carefully distinguished from the former by a conspicuous red thread.  Also, as you know, it is the habit of the enemy and ourselves when the trenches are near enough, to enliven each other by the casting of homely but effective hand-grenades made out of tins.  When a grenade drops in a British trench somebody seizes it instantly and throws it back.  To hoist the German with his own petard is particularly sweet to the British mind.  When a grenade drops into a German trench everybody runs. (At least that is what I am told happens by the men from our trenches; though possibly each side has its exceptions.) If the bomb explodes, it explodes.  If it doesn’t, Hans and Fritz presently come creeping back to see what has happened.  Sometimes the fuse hasn’t caught properly, it has been thrown by a nervous man; or it hasn’t burnt properly.  Then Hans or Fritz puts in a new fuse and sends it back with loving care.  To hoist the Briton with his own petard is particularly sweet to the German mind....  But here it is that military genius comes in.  Some gifted spirit on our side procured (probably by larceny) a length of mine fuse, the rapid sort, and spent a laborious day removing the red thread and making it into the likeness of its slow brother.  Then bits of it were attached to tin-bombs and shied—­unlit of course—­into the German trenches.  A long but happy pause followed.  I can see the chaps holding themselves in.  Hans and Fritz were understood to be creeping back, to be examining the unlit fuse, to be applying a light thereunto, in order to restore it to its maker after their custom....