There has been a dead man lying on the fire-step waiting to be taken down to the cemetery to-night. He was a sanitary-man, killed last night in the open while burying lavatory stuff between our front and support lines. His arm was stretched out and, when he was got in, it was still stiff, so that when they put him on the fire-step his stiff arm stretched right across the trench. His comrades joke as they push it out of the way to get by. ‘Out of the light, you old bastard. Do you own this bloody trench?’ Or they shake hands with him familiarly. ‘Put it there, Billy Boy.’ Of course, they’re miners and accustomed to death. They have a very limited morality, but they keep to it. They will, for instance, rob anyone, of anything, except a man in their own platoon; they will treat every stranger as an enemy until he is proved their friend, and then there is nothing they won’t do for him. They are lecherous, the young ones at least, but without the false shame of the English lecher. I had a letter to censor the other day written by a lance-corporal to his wife. He said that the French girls were nice to sleep with, so she mustn’t worry on his account, but that he far preferred sleeping with her and missed her a great deal. 6_th June_.—We have been billeted in Béthune, a fair-sized town about seven miles or so behind the front line. There is everything one wants, a swimming bath, all sorts of shops, especially a cake-shop, the best I’ve ever met, a hotel where you can get a really good dinner, and a theatre where we have brigade ‘gaffs.’ I saw a notice this morning on a building by the Béthune-La Bassée canal—‘Troops are forbidden to bomb fish. By order of the Town Major.’ Béthune is very little knocked about, except a part called Faubourg d’Arras, near the station. I am billeted with a family called Averlant Paul, in the Avenue de Bruay, people of the official class. They are refugees from Poimbert. There are two little boys and an elder sister, who is in what corresponds with the under-fifth of the local high-school. She was worried last night over her lessons and asked me to help her write out the theory of decimal division. She showed me the notes she had taken; they were full of abbreviations. I asked why she’d used abbreviations. She said: ‘The lady professor talked very fast because we were much hurried.’ ‘Why were you hurried?’ ‘Oh, because part of the school is used as a billet for the troops and the Germans were shelling it, and we were always having to take shelter in the cellar, and when we came back each time there was less and less time left.’