"How goes the Battery?"
"First class. And your crowd?"
"Crawling along as per, usual. Congrats on the Oudstyde affair!"
"Thanks frightfully! But the whole thing was a bit of a fluke—everyone knows that. They had thrown down a gas-attack and the wind went about-face. So we stayed where we were and shelled them through their chlorine. Then they got their Reserves up and came on in lumps—the old Zulu formation—and Pyers and his Engineers got to work with the"—the speaker's voice dropped to an undertone—"what Pyers calls the 'Piffbozzler.'"
"The rose by any other name——" quoted Red Tab, and went on: "I'd have given a tenner to have been there!—and as for old Clanronald—I wonder if he got leave from—wherever he is—to see the stunt that day?"
Said the Gunner:
"If he did—and had such a thing as a stomach about him, he must have simply—vomited! Pyers says he felt like the Angel with the Flaming Sword—when he didn't feel like an Indian jeweller with a blowpipe—frizzling a column of white ants marching over the floor. You've seen how the things come on and on——"
"Yahgh!" remarked Red Tab expressively.
"But—just for once—we didn't happen to be on the frizzled side. The C. in C. has laughed to the verge of hysterics over a leader in the Berlin Lokal Anzeiger, with reference to the realised dream of the 'homicidal maniac' Clanronald. 'A deplorable example of the perversion of Die Wissenschaft at the murderous hands of English military chemists,' they called it. Pretty neat from Boches who've been pumping burning paraffin into our trenches, and suffocating platoons of men with asphyxiating gases, ever since May."
"And particularly appropriate from people who bribed a crack Professor of Literature to engage as librarian at Gwyll Castle—set the Library Wing on fire and steal the portfolio with the plans of the 'homicidal maniac' three weeks before the War—when Prinz Heinrich and old Moltke were stopping in London. They'd promised their agent twelve million marks if he succeeded. Wonder what he got from them when the plot fizzled out? Well, so-long! Any message for Edith?'