The Germans in some parts of the Somme battlefield have been going down with frostbite in great numbers, so great as to put at least one battalion out of action. This is through getting feet wet and frozen in muddy trenches. To reach their front line, last month, in these valleys in front of Bapaume and Le Transloy, has been quite impossible to the Germans unless they went up over the open, or used such trenches as a self-respecting man could scarcely enter. They came up, as would any other soldiers under the same circumstances, across the open land. Even then there were places which a man could scarcely pass. I know a man who, in that same sunken road at Le Barque, pulled two of his comrades by force out of the mud--an everyday matter. They left their boots and socks in the mud behind them. If a man is wounded in some of those German trenches it takes eight men to get him to the dressing station and five hours to arrive there, and very much longer if there is any fighting in progress. One would not say that any of these difficulties have been more acute amongst the Germans than with the British and Australians--in some ways our men have faced and overcome greater hardships than the Germans. But there is this chief difference--the German is now getting back the shells which for two years he rained upon the British. And he is talking--like a German--about the unfairness of it. The German Staff claims that German infantry is the best in the world. Certainly it is tough, and thoroughly convinced that it is better than any of its friends. "The Turk is a pretty good fighter," said a German to me a few days ago, "and the Bulgars fight well. The Austrians are worth little. Every time the Russians drive the Austrians back they have to call us in to repulse the Russians again for them." The German infantryman is tough, but not tougher than ours, and without the dash; his outstanding virtue is his great power of work. But I do not believe from what I have seen that he works one scrap harder than the Australian. He might be supposed to have his heart more in the war than the soldier of any other nation, but he certainly has not. Many German soldiers have told me that there was a universal longing for the war to end--but they seem to wonder at your asking them what they think, or what their people in Germany think--as though it mattered one straw. They tell you, in a detached sort of way, that a great many of their people in Germany are tired of the war. "But they have no influence on these matters," they say, "nor have the soldiers. We do not meet together--we have nothing to say with it. They would go on with the war all next year even if a million more men are killed--they will bring back all the wounded, and the sick, if necessary."