At Melville we turned aside to inspect what was apparently a second Valley of Hinnom. It was a series of furnaces, built out of clay and old cans, efficiently disposing of the garbage of a town and a large section of the line. At West Outre an officer found time to show us his ingenious improvised laundry. His share was to fight the enemy by keeping our boys decently clean; and for this purpose he collected their dirty linen into huge piles. He had diverted the only available brook so as to put a portable building over it. His battalion consisted of the whole female strength of the country-side, and had to be prepared to advance or retire _pari passu_ with the other fighters. The chattering, shouting crowd, almost invisible in the fog of steam as we walked through, made me realize how difficult a command this regiment of washerwomen constituted. The triumph was that they all appeared to be contented and fraternal. As every one knows one of the worst problems of the trenches was vermin. We entered a huge building used in peace-time for the purposes of dyeing. A Jack Johnson had only just exploded in the moat that brought the water to the tanks, but provision was made for trifles of this kind. When we peered over the edge of a steaming vat, it was to discover a platoon of Tommies enjoying the "time of their lives," before they joined the line of naked beings, each scrubbing the now happy man ahead. An endless stream of garments advanced through electric superheaters in parallel columns. There seemed as much excitement about the chance of every man getting his own clothing back as there is in the bran pie at a children's Christmas party. While visiting the mud and squalor of a front trench in Flanders, only a few yards from the enemy's lines, the cheery occupants offered to brew some tea, exactly as we "boil our kettle" and have a good time in the safety of our Northern backwoods. One day I picked up some bright blue crystals. They proved to be "blue-stone," or sulphate of copper. When my pilot noticed that its presence puzzled me, he remarked casually, "There was a regimental dressing-station there a day or so ago. Probably that is the remains of it." On a siding at Calais station a veritable pyramid of filth met my eyes. On inspection it proved to be odd old boots dug from the mud of the battle-fields, and, sorted out from the other endless piles of debris, brought back as salvage. To attack one pair of such boots is depressing. Melancholia alone befitted the pile. Yet I saw close at hand, through a series of sheds, this polluted current entering and coming out at the other end new boots, at the rate of a thousand pairs a day--the talisman not being a Henry Ford of boot-making, but just a smiling English colonel in the sporting trousers of a mounted officer.