We foresee, unhappily, the winter robbing us of the boon of daily bathing. This is a serious matter. The morning splash has come to be indispensable. Daily at 6.30 you have been used to see the bald pate of General Birdwood bobbing beyond the sunken barge in shore, and a host of nudes lining the beach. The host is diminishing to a few isolated fellows who either are fanatics or are come down from the trenches and must clear up a vermin- and dust-infested skin at all costs. Naturally we prefer to bathe at mid-day, rather than at 6.30, when the sun has not got above the precipitous ridges of Sari Bair. But the early morning dip is almost the only safe one. The beach is still enfiladed by Turkish artillery from the right flank. But times are better; formerly both flanks commanded us. The gun on the right continues to harass. He is familiarly known as Beachy Bill. That on the left went by a name intended for the ears of soldiers only. Beachy Bill is, in fact, merely the collective name for a whole battery, capable of throwing over five shell simultaneously. Not infrequently Beachy Bill catches a mid-morning bathing squad. There is ducking and splashing shorewards, and scurrying over the beach to cover by men clad only in the garments Nature gave them. Shrapnel bursting above the water in which you are disporting yourself raises chiefly the question: Will it ever stop? By this you, of course, mean: Will the pellets ever cease to whip the water? The interval between the murderous lightning-burst aloft and the last pellet-swish seems, to the potential victim, everlasting. The suspense always is trying. The times and the seasons of Beachy Bill are inscrutable. Earlier on, the six o'clock bather was not safe. Now he is almost prepared to bet upon his chances. Possibly an enemy gun is by this time aware that there goes on now less than heretofore of that stealthy night discharge of lighters which used to persist beyond the dawn--until the job was finished. Wonderful is the march of organisation. It appreciably improves daily, under your eyes--organisation in mule transport to the flanks, in the landing of supplies, in the local distribution of rations; the last phase perhaps most obvious, because it comes home close to the business and bosoms of the troops. Where, a month ago, we languished on tinned beef and biscuit, we now rejoice daily in fresh meat, bread, milk, and (less frequently) fresh vegetables. It all becomes better than one dared to expect: a beef-steak and toast for breakfast, soup for dinner, boiled mutton for tea. This is all incredibly good. Yet the sickness diminishes little. Colic, enteric, dysentery, jaundice, are still painfully prevalent, and our sick are far-flung and thick over Lemnos, Egypt, Malta, and England. So long as flies and the unburied persist, we cannot well be delivered. But the wastage in sick men deported is near to being alarming.