community.  Some traces of their aboriginal state they still retain, and they cherish their totem, which is a bundle of black ribbons, rather like the flattened leaves of an artichoke, attached to the back of their collars.  It is the badge of their tribe.  Also at night some of them develop the most primitive of all instincts and crawl out on their stomachs with a hand-grenade to get as near as may be to the enemy’s listening posts and taste the joy of killing.  But by day they are as demure and sleepy as the tortoiseshell cat which has taken up its quarters in the dug-out.

Such is their life.  But they are quietly preparing to get a move on.  Some R.G.A. men have arrived with four pretty toys from Vickers’s, and one fine morning they are going to disturb those sand-bags opposite them with a battery of trench mortars; our field guns will draw a curtain of shrapnel in front of the German support trenches, and then they will satisfy their curiosity as to what is behind those inscrutable sand-bags.

IX

STOKES’S ACT

     An offender when in arrest is not to bear arms except by order of
     his C.O. or in an emergency.—­The King’s Regulations.

I

The President of the Court and the Judge-Advocate stood in private colloquy in one of the deep traverse-like windows of the Hotel de Ville over-looking the Place.  A heavy rain was falling from a sullen sky, and the deserted square was a dancing sea of agitation as the raindrops smote the little pools between the cobbles and ricochetted with a multitudinous hiss.  Now and again a gust of wind swept across, and the rain rattled against the windows.  On the opposite side of the square one of the houses gaped curiously, with bedroom and parlour exposed to view, as though some one had snatched away the walls and laid the scene for one of those Palais Royal farces in which the characters pursue a complicated domestic intrigue on two floors at once.  That house, with its bed exposed to the rain dripping from the open rafters, was indeed both farcical and indecent; it stood among its unscathed neighbours like a pariah.  The rain was loud and insistent, but not so loud as to dull the distant thunder of the guns.  The intermittent gusts of wind now and again interrupted its monotonous theme, but the intervals were as brief as they were violent, and in this polyphonic composition of rain, wind, and guns, the hissing of the raindrops came and went as in a fugue and with an inexpressible mournfulness.