These things, however, disturbed them but little and bored them a great deal.  So they set to work to make their particular rabbit-warren into a Garden City.  They held it on a repairing lease, and were constantly filling sand-bags, but that was merely to prevent depreciation, and didn’t count.  They first of all paved their trenches with bricks; there was no difficulty about the supply, as the “Jack Johnsons” obligingly acted as house-breakers in the village behind our lines, and bricks could be had for the fetching.  Then the orderly transplanted some pansies and forget-me-nots from the garden of a ruined house, and made a border in front of the company commander’s dug-out.  The communication trench had been carried across a stream with some planks, and one day a man with a gift for carpentry fixed up a balustrade out of the arms of an apple-tree, which had been lopped off by shell, and we had a rustic bridge.  When May came, water anemones opened their star-like petals on the surface of the clear amber stream, the orchard through which the communication trench had been cut burst into blossom, the sticky clay walls of the trench became hard as masonry in the sun, and one morning a board appeared with the legend “Hyde Park.  Keep off the grass.”

With these amenities their manners grew more and more refined.  I have read somewhere, in one of those dull collections of sweeping generalisations that are called sociology, that each species of the genus homo has to go through a normal sequence of stages from barbarism to civilisation, and that we were once what the South Sea Islanders are now.  Which may be very true, but as regards that particular primitive community I can testify that their social evolution has in three months gone through all the stages that occupy other communities three thousand years.  They began as cave-dwellers and they end by occupying suburban villas—­the captain’s dug-out has a roof of corrugated iron, a window, a book-shelf, a table, and even chairs, and his table manners have vastly improved.  They have progressed from candles stuck in bully-beef tins to electric reading-lamps.  Three months ago they were hairy men whose beards did grow beneath their shoulders, and their puttees were cemented with wet clay; to-day they are clean-shaven and their Burberrys might be worn in Piccadilly.  They slept with nothing between them and the earth but a ground sheet what time they were not, like the elephant, sleeping on their feet and propped against a trench wall.  Now they sleep on a bed with a wooden frame.  I have read somewhere that for a thousand years Europe was unwashed.  It may be so, but I know that this particular tribal community progressed rapidly through all such stages, from a bucket to a shower-bath in billets, in about six weeks, and you can see their men any day washing themselves to the waist near the support trenches—­men who a month or two ago had forgotten how to take their clothes off.  They are, in fact, a highly civilised