I have been over into Belgium to-day: crossed the frontier on my motor bike; the roads are terrible, all this beastly “pavé” cobblestones; awful stuff to ride over on a motor cycle. Shell holes on both sides of the road, and I saw three graves in the corner of a hop garden. All along the road there were dozens and dozens of old London motor buses, taking men to the trenches. They still have the advertisements on them and are driven by the bus-drivers themselves. Three hundred came over with their own machines. They are now soldiers. The observation balloon I mentioned yesterday was shelled down to-day. I am writing this in an old Flemish farmhouse, and the room I’m sitting in has a carved rafter ceiling, red brick floor and nasty purple cabbage wallpaper. All the men of the house with the exception of the old man are at the war; one son has already died. The Germans have been through here. They tied the mayor of the town to a tree and shot him. The trenches have been filled in, all the wreckage cleared, and they have a new mayor. ------------------------------------- It is not yet 7 A.M. I am an orderly officer and have to take the men out for a run at six. I came back and bought a London “Daily Mail” of yesterday from a country-woman. We are at least three miles from the town, but they are enterprising enough to bring papers to us at this time in the morning. A “Daily Mail” costs four cents. Since I last wrote I have been up to the front line. Everything is different from what you imagine. The German trenches are easily distinguished through glasses; their sand-bags are multi-colored. Shrapnel was bursting over ruins of an old town in their lines. When you look through a periscope at the wilderness, it is difficult to imagine that thousands of soldiers on both sides have burrowed themselves into the earth. The evidence of their alertness is shown by their snipers, who are always busy whenever the target is up.