Jerry's front line trench and ours were not three hundred yards apart.
Over that sinister strip of ground attack and counter-attack had
surged and ebbed in a darkness often turned to day by Verey lights and
star-shells. Brave men on each side had reached their objective, but
"fell Sergeant Death" often took charge.
In our sector was a 1914 "Contemptible," who, despite mud and adverse
conditions, made his New Army comrades smile at his barrack-room
efforts to keep his uniform and equipment just so.
Of Coster ancestry, his name was Dan, and, of course, they called him
Dandy. He felt distinctly annoyed when on several days an officer
passed him in the trench with the third button of his tunic missing.
"'Is batman ought bloomin' well be for it," he soliloquised.
Another night visit to Jerry's trench, and again some poor fellows stay
there for keeps. In broad noonday Dan is once more aggrieved by seeing
an officer with a button missing who halts in the trench to ask him the
whereabouts of B.H.Q. and other details. The tunic looked the same,
third button absent, _but it was not the same officer_.
Now Dan's platoon sergeant, also a Londoner, was a man who had
exchanged his truncheon for a more deadly weapon. Him Dan accosts:
"I've a conundrum I'd like to arsk you, sergeant, as I don't see
Sherlock 'Olmes nowhere. W'y do orficers lose their third button?"
As became an ex-policeman, the sergeant's suspicions were aroused by
the coincidence, so much so indeed that he made discreet enquiries and
discovered that the original owner of a tunic minus a third button had
been reported missing, believed dead, after a recent trench raid.
The adjutant very soon made it his business to intercept the new wearer
and civilly invite him to meet the O.C. at B.H.Q. Result: a firing
party at dawn.
When the news of the spy filtered through, Dan's comment was; "Once,
when a rookie, I was crimed at the Tower for paradin' with a button
missin', but I've got even now by havin' an orficer crimed for the same
thing, even if he _was_ only a blinkin' 'Un!"--_H. G., Plaistow._