Cellars are quite often utilized as shelters where a little village has become incorporated in the lines. They often make comparatively luxurious places of residence for officers and men, as luxury goes in these parts. The fallen brick walls, in addition to the cellar roof, give fair protection, though a straight hit by a shell would mean a good chance of death to those within. As breweries are usually the most palatial buildings in French towns, they are often chosen as headquarters, or as dressing stations either for field ambulances or regimental aid posts. A brewery at Aix Noulette which, not excepting the church, was the only building not destroyed by shell fire, for many months served as a most complete advanced dressing station. The rats were plentiful, as they are in most dugouts, and often their little beady eyes would stare in a startled manner at one's flashlight, and their bodies remain in a sort of hypnotized immobility. But this brewery gave shelter to thirty or forty patients, and was exceedingly useful, till one day a selfish artillery officer came along and placed a battery of heavies just behind it to draw German fire on the brewery. This is a disagreeable habit of the artillery, to choose hitherto safe locations and to turn them into uninhabitable ones, to the disgust of those about. One cellar dugout in Calonne is worthy of description. It was in the cellar of what had been a large residence. We used it as a regimental aid post, and it was by far the most luxurious that I have had the pleasure of seeing. In the room of the cellar occupied by the M.O. the walls had been papered, a fireplace installed, and it contained two comfortable beds, arm chairs, two carved oak-framed mirrors, and a well-tuned piano with a stool. This was only four hundred yards from the front line. Often as the shells dropped all about us a group of officers sat there in the warm glow of a coal fire--the coal probably filched by our batmen from the fosse nearby--while someone of a musical turn played the piano, and the others sang such classical ditties as, Annie Laurie, When Irish Eyes Are Smiling, and Another Little Drink Wouldn't Do Us Any Harm. One morning, after a night of jollity such as this during which the shelling had been fairly heavy, one of the orderlies found a "dud" in the next cellar which, had it exploded, would have jolted the piano a bit! An engineering officer mentioned to me that he had been passing the previous night, and could not believe his ears when he heard the singing and the piano accompaniment. Could he be blamed?