“Why!” said the other with a certain paternal sensitiveness, “what do you suggest?”

“I suggest,” said the Judge-Advocate pensively,—­“I suggest we call it Stokes’s Act.”

* * * * *

Now this story has one merit—­if it has no other.  It is true.  And as for the rest of the Act and its preamble, and its sections and its sub-sections, are they not written in the Statute Book?  In the Temple they call it 5 & 6 Geo. V. cap. 23.  But out there they call it “Stokes’s Act.”

X

THE FRONT

Persons of a rheumatic habit are said to apprehend the approach of damp weather by certain presentiments in their bones.  So people of a nervous temperament—­like the writer—­have premonitions of the approach to “the Front” by a feeling of cold feet.  These are usually induced by the spectacle of large and untimely cavities in the road, but they may be accentuated, as not infrequently happened, by seeing the process of excavation itself—­and hearing it.  The effect on the auditory nerves is known as “k-r-rump,” which is, phonetically speaking, a fairly literal translation.  The best thing to do on such occasions is to obey the nursery rhyme, and “open your mouth and shut your eyes.”  The intake of air will relieve the pressure on your ear-drums.  I have been told by one of our gunners that the gentle German has for years been experimenting in order to produce as “frightful” and intimidating a sound by the explosion of his shells as possible.  He has succeeded.  Cases have been known of men without a scratch laughing and crying simultaneously after a too-close acquaintance with the German hymnology of hate.  The results are, however, sometimes disappointing from the German point of view, as in the case of the soldier who, being spattered with dirt but otherwise untouched, picked himself up, and remarked with profound contempt, “The dirty swine!”

The immediate approach to the trenches is usually marked by what sailors call a “dodger,” which is to say, a series of canvas screens.  These do not conceal your legs, and if you are exceptionally tall, they may not conceal your head.  Your feet don’t matter, but if you are wise you duck your head.  Nine out of ten soldiers take an obstinate pride in walking upright, and will laugh at you most unfeelingly for your pains.  Once in the communication trench you are fairly safe from snipers, but not, of course, from shrapnel or high-angle fire.  A communication trench which I visited, when paying an afternoon call at a dug-out, was wide enough to admit a pony and cart, and, as it has to serve to bring up ration-parties and stretcher-bearers as well as reliefs, it is made as wide as is consistent with its main purpose, which is to protect the approach and to localise the effect of shell-fire as much as possible, the latter object being effected by frequent “traversing.”  To reach the fire-trenches is easy enough; the difficulty