CLUB LAW IN THE TRENCH

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 11, 14 January 1915, Page 6

CLUB LAW IN THE TRENCH

Writing from Paris to London "Daily Mail," Georgte C. Curuock says: There is one set of trenches in which tlreib gay Parisians have started a club, the Troglodytes. They have' a set of rules, and if 'some are a little reminiscent 'of /the/boulevards the rest, is plain enough. The club member'is, for example,' warned that he must not" play chess (echecs— no "checks'' 'allowed!" or draughts (jeu de dames'—no ladies allowed!) A member may put his feet on the seats or coubhes, but he must, not'take, his boots off, The rule against strangers is strict—only members of the French'Army" admitted and "German 'shells strictly barred. Not very funny, you think! Well, it takes a sound'humorist to be'amusing in the trenches.

For humor of the grimmer kind the trenches are already famous. A recent visitor to the trench was allowed to peer through a spy-hole with glasses and' see, not many hundreds of yards away, a couple of little sixpenny French flags fluttering in the breefce within a hundred yards of the German trenches. "One of our men crawled out last night and stuck them there," said his guide. "Pretty bit of; work, was it not?" what are those heaps lying beside them?" asked the visitor, still peering through the glasses. His friend laughed again. "Four Germans," he said. 'Each of thorn thought he could get those flags."' In more than one place this grim little comedy has "been played. Near' another line-' of German trenches a French flag flies from a -tree. 'The daring climber got back to his lines in saf'ctyj and a German has been "caught in the act" of trying to pull the flag down. '

General Joffre recently allowed us to know'that the'trenches in some parts' of the Argoiine are only.forty yards apart. In such~a place messages, shouted or written, are often sent from the French to. the German lines. A favouite joke is to cut out a beetroot in the caricature of the Kaiser \ stuff it with priiited, bulletins of French ahd Russian victories', and sling it by hand from one side to- tlio other.

So fixed and regular does life become in these, trenches after weeks of residence that the more daring spirits will go-out at night and set snares, for rabbits, within a hundred yards of the enemy. One Zouave, writing home, tells how he went out one night to his snares and found a German in the act of stealing his rabbits. "The beggar had four of them," complained the Zouave, "so I took him along with me—the thief!—the rabbits, too; yon may be sure I did not forget them." . Thus it goes on day after day in thousands of trenches—laughter and death hand in hand—along a line of 'more"than two hundred miles, and so it may easily go oh all this winter, 'with snow in the trenches and death outside them. And when the fierce fighting is over in the north the s?>me life of siege will begin -for the British Army as well. It will, be the, trenches of Sebastopol over again. Those who are still wondering what they can do to help the men who are fighting in France should sot to work again and make still more warm clothes, and devise still more means of keeping alive the men in the trenches this winter. It is the Army which comes best out of them in the spring which will win its way. to the next big victory.