But it is only the wounded officers who are comfortable. The Medical Officers freeze and soak in bell-tents. You'll see the batmen drying their blankets nightly at the mess-fire before their "bosses" go to rest. No artificial heating is possible in these tents, because there is no fuel available for those who are well. M.O.'s retire after an all-night bout in the theatre to their clammy beds, and sleep from exhaustion; and for no other reason. They wake, and shiver into dewy clothes. They shiver through their meals in the biting mess-tent, and they plod through the sea of slush that surrounds the wards incessantly, now that the winter has set in. For the ground is never dry. When it's not raining (which is seldom) it's snowing--and snowing good and hard, as a rule, in fat flakes as big as carnations. But they're a cheerful mess, with work enough to save them from dwelling overmuch on the discomforts of the Somme winter. There are twenty of them. The Colonel is a Regular, with long years of Indian service behind him, whose favourite table topics are big-game and economic problems--particularly those hypothetical economic difficulties which are likely to confront us after this war. His customary opponent is Padré Thomas, the Roman Catholic Chaplain, who took a double-first at Oxford and was one time an Eton master. He receives weekly from a favourite nephew, reading for matriculation, Latin prose exercises, the merits of which he discusses with those members of the mess whose classical scholarship war has not quite obliterated. There is Wallace, the X-ray expert, whose chief topic is the shortage of paraffin, lacking which his apparatus cannot carry-on. He's a Scotchman who once graduated in Arts. He is chief consulting specialist with the Chaplain on the merits of his nephew's prose composition. The Anglican padré is a raw-boned Scot (six-feet four) who has lived mostly in Russia and Germany. He talks a great deal of vodka and the hoggishness of German manners. "What a treat it would be," he says, "to march into Berlin with the pipes playing, go through to meet the Russians on the other side, and have a foregathering! That night I should cast away _all_ my ecclesiastical badges!" He preaches to the camp of German prisoners close by with a grace that is not altogether good. He cannot abide Germans. One envisages him as delivering them fire-and-brimstone discourses and calling them weekly to repentance.