The men are all remarkably fit and jolly. One or two old hands here have told me the line we are taking over is really pretty bad. Certainly it was a revelation to our fellows, after the beautiful, clean tuppenny-tubes of trenches we constructed on Salisbury Plain. But one hears no grousing at all, except of the definitely humorous and rather pleased kind--rather bucked about it, you know--the men are simply hungry for a chance to "get" at the Hun, and they work like tigers at trench betterment. We are all well and jolly, and even if sometimes you don't hear often, there's not the slightest need to worry in any way about your "_Temporary Gentleman_." A DISSERTATION ON MUD The second of our rest days is over, and to-morrow night we shall go into the firing line and relieve the ----s. We shall march back the way we came out, down the sad-looking green valley round the lips of which some of our batteries are hidden; through the deserted streets of ----, with its boarded-up shops and houses; on over the weed-grown railway track, through a little village whose church is still unbroken; though few of its cottage windows have any glass left in them; across the busy little river to Ambulance Corner--a favourite target for Boche shells, that bit of road--and so through the wooded hollow where the German gas lies deadly thick when it comes, into the foot of Manchester Avenue, the long communication trench leading up to the Battalion's trench headquarters in the support line, where "A" Company will branch off to the right, "B" to the left, and "C" to the extreme left of our sub-sector. That town I mentioned--not the little village close to Ambulance Corner, where most roofs and walls show shell-torn rents and a few are smashed to dust--is rather like a city of the dead. It has a cathedral which the gentle Hun has ranged on with thoughtful frightfulness. But though, under the guidance of his aerial observers, the Boche has smashed up that cathedral pretty thoroughly, and its tower has great gaping chunks riven out of its sides by shells, yet, as folk say miraculously, its crowning attraction, a monstrous gilt figure of the Madonna and Child, thirty to fifty feet high, remains intact. But this remarkable gilt statue has been undermined at its base by H.E. shell, and now hangs over at right angles to the street far below it--a most extraordinary sight. The devout naturally claim that no German projectile will prove powerful enough to lower the sacred emblem any farther. Boche savagery in France has not weakened anyone's faith, I think; possibly the reverse. A foundry or factory near by is now a tangled mass of scrap iron, and as one marches through the town one has queer intimate glimpses of deserted bedroom interiors, with homely furnishings exposed to all the weather, where a shell has sliced one wall clean down from a first or second storey and left the ground floor intact.