We have for neighbors four dead cows and an unexploded six-inch shell, liable to go off any time, all in a radius of one hundred yards. We have smashed holes through five walls so that we can go through the ruins unobserved. In one place we pass over a dead cow, and in another we wade through several tons of rotten potatoes, and I believe we have a corpse handy; and part of our trench goes through another heap of rotten mangles. I’m an authority on smells. I can almost tell the nationality of a corpse now by the smell. It will soon be necessary to wear our smoke-helmets to go into the emplacement. I don’t think that I have told you that I cross the Yser canal about six times a day. I’d been up a week before I knew what it was. Now it only has a few feet of water in it, the rest being held in the German locks. The part I cross over is full of bulrushes, and is the home of moor-hens, water rats, mosquitoes and frogs. On one side of the canal is a bank which is in great demand by the machine gunners, who are able to get a certain amount of height and observation of their fire. The general has ordered a field gun to take up a position on this bank. He refers to it as his “Sniping eighteen-pounder.” It is firing at seven hundred yards right at the German line and smashes up their parapet in a style that is pretty to watch. The machine gunners are in a great state, because the enemy will soon be “searching” with his artillery for the eighteen-pounder and the lairs of the smaller hidden guns will suffer. The men are hunting for lice in their underwear. This is the kind of conversation that is coming through from the next cellars: “I’ve got you beat—that’s forty-seven.” “Wait a minute”—a sound of tearing cloth—“but look at this lot, mother and young.” “With my forty and these you’ll have to find some more.” They were betting on the number they could find. I peel off my shirt myself and burn them off with a candle. I glory in the little pop they make when the heat gets to them. All the insect powder in the world has been tried out on them and they’ve won. All sentries here are doubled; one thing it’s safer, and another it’s company; even when things are quiet, rats and mice scamper about and it sets your nerves on end. Things which are inanimate during the day become alive at night. Trees seem to walk about. I wonder what it tastes like to have a real meal in which tinned food does not figure; fancy a tablecloth; my tablecloth is a double sheet of newspaper, and even then I can’t have a new one every day. ------------------------------------- Had a good night’s rest; came in about twelve o’clock and slept until eight-thirty this morning. One eye is completely closed up by a sting.