Storm brewing. Flies bad, driven in by the wind. Nature goes on just the same. I suppose that this farm would be just as fly-ridden in an ordinary summer. During the bombarding yesterday I noticed swallows flying about quite unconcerned. Corn, mostly self-planted, grows right up to the trenches. Cabbages grow wild. Communicating trenches run right through fields of crops; flowers grow in profusion between the lines, big red poppies and field daisies, and there are often hundreds of little frogs in the bottom of the trenches. ------------------------------------- A trip to No Man’s Land is an excursion which you never forget. It varies in width and horrors. My impression was similar to what I should feel being on Broadway without any clothes—a naked feeling. Forty-seven and one half inches of earth are necessary to stop a bullet, and it’s nice to have that amount of dirt between you and the enemy’s bullets. The dead lie out in between the lines or hang up on the wire; they don’t look pretty after they have been out some time. It’s a pleasant job to have to get their identification disks, and we have to search the bodies of the enemy dead for papers and even buttons so that we can know what unit is in front of us. Flowers grow in between, butterflies play together, and birds nest in the wire. When the grass becomes too high it has to be cut, because otherwise it would prevent good observation. In some places grass doesn’t have a chance to even take root, let alone grow. The shells take care of that. I managed to get a translation of a diary kept by a German soldier who fell on the field. Below is an exact translation and gives the point of view of a man in the trenches on the other side of the line. He was writing his diary at the same time I was writing mine, and we were both fighting around the salient at Ypres, Hooge being on the point of the salient farthest east. This part, which was once a place of beauty which people came long distances to see, is now like a great muddy Saragossa Sea which at the height of its fury has suddenly become frozen with the tortured limbs of trees and men, and wreckage and reeking smells, until it can again lash itself in wild fury into whirlpools. It is in all respects Purgatory, but of greater horror than Dante ever dreamt of. ------------------------------------- _Diary of F---- P---- of the 6th Company, 3d Battalion, 132d Regiment. Killed at Hooge on August 9th, 1915._ On May 10, we were told to prepare for the journey to the front. Each man received his service ammunition and two days’ rations, and we then started with heavy packs on our backs and our water-bottles full of coffee. After a long march we reached our reserve position, where we were put into rest billets for two days in wooden huts hidden in a wood. We could hear from here the noise of the shells coming through the air.