Though five-sixths of them slept stertorously in their holes by day, by night they were as wakeful as owls, and not less predatory.  Life in the trenches is one long struggle for existence, and in the course of it they developed those acquired characteristics whereby the birds of the air and the beasts of the field maintain themselves in a world of carnage.  They learnt to walk delicately on the balls of their feet as silently as hares, to see in the dark like foxes, to wriggle like the creeping things of the field, to lower their voices with the direction of the wind, to select a background with the moonlight, and to stand motionless on patrol with muscles rigid like a pointer when the star-shells dissolved the security of the night.  They studied to dissemble with their lips and to imitate the vocabulary of nature.  They grew more and more chary of human speech, and listening posts talked with the trenches by pulls on a fishing-reel.  They never sheathed their claws, and working-parties wore their equipment as though it were the integument of nature.  Bayonets were never unfixed unless the moon were very bright.  At night they scraped out their earths like a badger, and, like the badger’s, those earths were exceeding clean.  The men were numbered off by threes from the flank, and one in three watched for two hours while the other two worked, repairing parapets, strengthening entanglements, and filling sand-bags.  Every half-hour the N.C.O. on duty crept round to report, or to post and relieve, while now and again a patrol went out to observe.  All this was done stealthily and with an amazing economy of speech.  Night was also the time of their foraging, when the company’s rations were brought up the communication trench and handed over by the C.Q.M.S. to each platoon sergeant, who passed them on to the section commander, and he in turn distributed them among his men in such silence and with such little traffic that it seemed like the provision of manna in the wilderness.  At dawn pick-axe and spade were laid aside, the rum ration was served out, and all men stood to, for dawn was the hour of their apprehension.

Two miles behind them is a battery of our field guns, and they have with them an observing officer who talks intimately to his battery on the field telephone in that laconic language of which gunners are so fond, such as “One hundred.  Twenty minutes to the left.”  Then the shells sing over their heads with a pretty low trajectory, and the Huns, beginning to get annoyed, reply with their heavy guns.  There is a low whistle up aloft, a noise like the fluttering of invisible wings, and the next moment a cloud of black smoke rises over the village of X——­ Y——­, behind the trenches.  The Smoke Prevention Society ought to turn their attention to “Jack Johnsons”; their habits are positively filthy.