A train of ammunition trucks, timed to arrive at the moment when the road was unoccupied, put in appearance as the end of the infantry column passed, and the captain in charge urged the men on to speedy unloading and fumed over delays by reason of darkness. The men received big shells in their arms and carried them to the roadside dumps where they were piled in readiness for the guns. The road was in an exposed position and this active battery was liable to draw enemy fire at any time, so the ammunition train captain was anxious to get his charges away in a hurry. His fears were not without foundation, because in the midst of the unloading, one German missile arrived in a nearby field and sprayed the roadway with steel just as every one flattened out on the ground. Five ammunition hustlers arose with minor cuts and one driver was swearing at the shell fragment which had gone through the radiator of his truck and liberated the water contents. The unloading was completed with all speed, and the ammunition train moved off, towing a disabled truck. With some of the gunners who had helped in unloading, I crawled into the chalk dugout to share sleeping quarters in the straw. "What paper do you represent?" one man asked me as he sat in the straw, unwrapping his puttees. I told him. "Do you want to know the most popular publication around this place?" he asked, and I replied affirmatively. "It's called the _Daily Woollen Undershirt_," he said. "Haven't you seen everybody sitting along the roadside reading theirs and trying to keep up with things? Believe me, it's some reading-matter, too." "Don't let him kid you," said the section chief, "I haven't had to read mine yet. The doctor fixed up the baths in town and yesterday he passed around those flea charms. Have you seen them?" For our joint inspection there was passed the string necklace with two linen tabs soaked in aromatic oil of cedar, while the section chief gave an impromptu lecture on personal sanitation. It was concluded by a peremptory order from without for extinction of all lights. The candle stuck on the helmet top was snuffed and we lay down in darkness with the guns booming away on either side. * * * * * Our positions were located in a country almost as new to war as were the fields of Flanders in the fall of '14. A little over a month before it had all been peaceful farming land, far behind the belligerent lines. Upon our arrival, its sprouting fields of late wheat and oats were untended and bearing their first harvest of shell craters. The abandoned villages now occupied by troops told once more the mute tales of the homeless. The villagers, old men, old women and children, had fled, driving before them their cows and farm animals even as they themselves had been driven back by the train of German shells. In their deserted cottages remained the fresh traces of their departure and the ruthless rupturing of home ties, generations old.