It takes some time to distinguish whether shells are arrivals or departures, but after a while you get into the way of telling their direction and size by sound. Roads are constantly shelled, searching for troops or supply columns. I was coming home to-day, up a road which ran approximately at right angles to main fire trenches. At one place the road was exposed for a matter of thirty or forty feet, and again farther up it was necessary to go over the brow of a small hill. This was about three hundred yards farther on and was exposed to the enemy’s view. Thinking they wouldn’t bother about a single rider on a motor cycle, I went up past the first exposed position. My carburetor was giving me some trouble and I thought I would see if any rain had got into it, so I turned off the road down a cross-road and dismounted when _crash_! a shell landed right in the middle of the road as far up the exposed place as I was round the corner. Then five more followed the first shell. Had I gone on I could not possibly have missed collecting most of the fragments. The German gunners had spotted me in the first position and decided that a lone man on a motor cycle must be either an officer or despatch rider. So they tried to get him. The shells were shrapnel and the time was calculated splendidly. They had taken into consideration the speed of my motor cycle. Cross-roads are particularly attended to, for there is a double chance of hitting something, and in consequence it is always unhealthy to linger on a crossroad. ------------------------------------- Dugouts are often made very comfortable with windows, tiled floors and furniture taken from neighboring shattered chateaux. I have even seen them with flowers growing in window-boxes over the entrance. They all have names. Some I saw yesterday were called “Anti-Krupp Cottage,” “Pleasant View,” and “Little Grey Home in the West.” There was one very homey site, well equipped and fitted, which had been dubbed the “Nut,”—the colonel lived there. My old corps brought an aeroplane down with a machine gun last night. They were in a shell hole between the main and support trenches. For the last few days I have been “up” looking for gun positions. The lice are getting to be a torment. You have no idea how bad they are. Everybody up here is infested with them. I have tried smearing myself with kerosene, but that does not seem to trouble them at all. Silk underwear is supposed to keep them down. I suppose their feet slip on the shiny surface. The food lately has taken on a wonderful flavor and I now know how dissolved German tastes. The cook, instead of sending back two miles for water to cook with, has been using water from the moat in which a Boche had been slowly disintegrating.