Greatcoat 1 Tin, mess 1 „ cover 1 Shirt 1 Socks, pair 1 Soap 1 Towel 1 Housewife 1 Holdall 1 Razor 1 „ case 1 Cardigan 1 Cap, fatigue comforter 1 Pay-book 1 Disc, identity 1 Waterproof sheet 1 Tin of grease 1 Field-service dressing 1 Respirator 1 Spine protector 1 Jack knife 1 Set of equipment Lather brush 1 Comb 1 Fork 1 Knife 1 Spoon 1 Tooth brush 1 Laces, pair 1 Rounds ammunition 150 Rifle and bayonet Rifle cover 1 Oil bottle and pull-through. Entrenching tool 1 Well, anyhow, marching on cobbled roads is difficult, so when a staff-officer came by in a Rolls-Royce and cursed us for bad march-discipline I felt like throwing something at him. Trench soldiers hate the staff and the staff know it. The principal disagreement seems to be about the extent to which trench conditions should modify discipline. The La Bourse miners are old men and boys dressed in sloppy blue clothes with bulging pockets. There are shell craters all around the pit-head. I am billeted with a fatherly old man called Monsieur Hojdés, who has three marriageable daughters; one of them lifted up her skirt to show me a shell-wound on her thigh that laid her up last winter. 22_nd May_.—A colossal bombardment by the French at Souchez, a few miles away—continuous roar of artillery, coloured flares, shells bursting all along the ridge by Notre Dame de Lorette. I couldn’t sleep. It went on all night. Instead of dying away it grew and grew till the whole air rocked and shook; the sky was lit up with huge flashes. I lay in my feather bed and sweated. This morning they tell me there was a big thunderstorm in the middle of the bombardment. But, as Walker says: ‘Where the gunder ended and the thunder began was hard to say.’ The men had hot baths at the mines and cleaned up generally. Their rifles are all in an advanced state of disrepair and many of their clothes are in rags, but neither can be replaced, we are told, until they are much worse. The platoon is billeted in a barn full of straw. Old Burford, who is so old that he refuses to sleep with the other men of the platoon, has found a doss in an out-building among some farm tools. In trenches he will sleep on the fire-step even in the rain rather than in a warm dug-out with the other men. He says that he remembers the C.O. when he was in long skirts. Young Bumford is the only man he’ll talk to. The platoon is always ragging Bumford for his childish simplicity. Bumford plays up to it and begs them not to be too hard on ‘a lad from the hills.’