9_th June_.—I am beginning to realize how lucky I was in my gentle introduction to the trenches at Cambrin. We are now in a nasty salient a little to the south of the brick-stacks, where casualities are always heavy. The company had seventeen casualities yesterday from bombs and grenades. The front trench averages thirty yards from the Germans. To-day, at one part, which is only twenty yards away from an occupied German sap, I came along whistling _The Farmer s Boy_, to keep up my spirits, when suddenly I saw a group bending over a man lying at the bottom of the trench. He was making a snoring noise mixed with animal groans. At my feet was the cap he had worn, splashed with his brains. I had never seen human brains before; I had somehow regarded them as a poetical figment. One can joke with a badly-wounded man and congratulate him on being out of it. One can disregard a dead man. But even a miner can’t make a joke that sounds like a joke over a man who takes three hours to die after the top part of his head has been taken off by a bullet fired at twenty yards range. Beaumont, of whom I told you in my last letter, was also killed. He was the last unwounded survivor of the original battalion, except for the transport men. He had his legs blown against his back. Every one was swearing angrily, then an R.E. officer came up and told me that there was a tunnel driven under the German front line and that if we wanted to do a bit of bombing, now was the time. So he sent the mine up—it was not a big one, he said, but it made a tremendous noise and covered us with dirt—and the chaps waited for a few seconds for the other Germans to rush up to help the wounded away and then they chucked all the bombs they had. Beaumont had been telling me how he had won about five pounds in the sweepstake after the Rue du Bois show. It was a sweepstake of the sort that leaves no bitterness behind it. Before a show the platoon pools all its available cash and the winners, who are the survivors, divide it up afterwards. Those who are killed can’t complain, the wounded would have given far more than that to escape as they have, and the unwounded regard the money as a consolation prize for still being here.