'You always want to know what things look like, old Pam, so I'll try and tell you. In the first place, it's just a glorious spring day. At the back of the cranky bit of a ruined farm where we have our diggings (by the way, you may always go back at night and find half your bedroom shot away--that happened to me the other night--there was a tunic of mine still hanging on the door, and when you opened the door, nothing but a hole ten feet deep full of rubble--jolly luck, it didn't happen at night-time!) there are actually some lilac trees, and the buds on them are quite big. And somehow or other the birds manage to sing in spite of the hell the Huns have made of things. 'I'm looking out now due east. There's a tangled mass of trenches not far off, where there's been some hot raiding lately. I see an engineer officer with a fatigue party working away at them--he's showing the men how to lay down a new trench with tapes and pegs. Just to my left some men are filling up a crater. Then there's a lorry full of bits of an old corduroy road they're going to lay down somewhere over a marshy place. There are two sausage balloons sitting up aloft, and some aeroplanes coming and going. Our front line is not more than a mile away, and the German line is about a mile and a quarter. Far off to my right I can just see a field with tanks in it. Ah--there goes a shell on the Hun line--another! Can't think why we're tuning up at this time of day. We shall be getting some of their heavy stuff over directly, if we don't look out. It's rot! 'And the sun is shining like blazes on it all. As I came up I saw some of our men resting on the grass by the wayside. They were going up to the trenches--but it was too early--the sun was too high--they don't send them in till dusk. Awfully good fellows they looked! And I passed a company of Bantams, little Welsh chaps, as fit as mustard. Also a poor mad woman, with a basket of cakes and chocolate. She used to live in the village where I'm sitting now--on a few bricks of it, I mean. Then her farm was shelled to bits and her old husband and her daughter killed. And nothing will persuade her to go. Our people have moved her away several times--but she always comes back--and now they let her alone. Our soldiers indeed are awfully good to her, and she looks after the graves in the little cemetery. But when you speak to her, she never seems to understand, and her eyes--well, they haunt one.