I’m writing this in a new home, this time a splinter-proof dugout. The Huns are again strafing us—last shell burst fifty yards away a few minutes ago. Several times since I started writing I have had to shake off the dust and debris thrown by shell bursts on to these pages. I was again sniped at with shrapnel this morning on my machine while reconnoitering the roads—they all missed, but they’re not nice. I’m filthy, alive, and covered with huge mosquito bites; you get sort of used to the incessant din in time. Even the forty-two centimeter shells, which make a row like freight trains with loose couplings going through the air, are not so terrible now. Through a hole in my dugout I can see the Huns’ shells Kulturing a chateau. It was once a very beautiful place with a moat, bridges, and splendid gardens. Now it’s useless except that the timber and the furniture come in useful for our dugouts and the making of “duck walks,” the grated walks which line the bottom of the trenches. Last night I was sitting in the Medical Officer’s dugout when a man I knew came in. He was an officer in the Second Gordons. “I feel pretty bad, doc.” He explained his symptoms. “Trench fever; you go down the line.” “No, fix me up for tonight and maybe I won’t need anything else.” He didn’t! All that is left of him is being buried now, less than a hundred yards from where I write this. ------------------------------------- Before I came here I had to go to another part of the line, in which the “Princess Pats” distinguished themselves. We have been hanging on ever since, and a mighty stiff proposition it is. The O.C. to-day told me that he had not slept for fifty-six hours. The Germans in one place are only twenty-five yards away—so close that conversation is carried on in a whisper. In one place they had stuck up a board with “Warsaw Captured” on it. My section worked until two o’clock and then the sandbags gave out, so we had to come home. This was a disappointment to me. I wanted to get the job finished. My men went on filling sandbags from the same place last night and discovered the remains of the late owner of the sword bayonet. He has now been decently buried, with a little wooden cross marked— TO AN UNKNOWN FRENCH SOLDIER R.I.P. When you read in the newspapers, that a trench was lost or taken, just think what it means. Think what happens to the men in the trenches; that’s the part of it we see. Stretchers pass by all day. Since I have been here the cemetery has grown—a new mound—a simple wooden cross. Nobody talks about it, but everybody wonders who’s next. The men here are splendid, the best in the world, and the officers are gentlemen. [Illustration] A French Soldier. -------------------------------------