We received a surprise yesterday evening on returning to our quarters--the regimental band has been playing Two-Steps and dreamy valses on the village green. We had just unbuckled our straps before the barns when the first strains burst forth. The immediate effects of this unwonted clamour were somewhat remarkable. Less than a minute after one of the men had cried "There's a band!" the German centre had been broken! A minute later and we had made eighty thousand prisoners. By the time I arrived on the scene, the Russians were in Berlin. Outside the saw-mill I met an old dame who informed me with an air of great mystery: "That the Kaiser was dead of a stroke, but no one would be allowed to say anything about it until to-morrow!" On investigation, however, I learn that this concert is not intended to celebrate a manifestation of national joy, but is the result of an idea of our Major. Battalion orders handed to me as I leave duly enlighten me. I read that: "The appearance of the regiment is slovenly" ... that it "shows only too plainly the effects of a prolonged stay in the wooded regions where man displays a tendency to revert to a condition of nature" ... that "it is essential to return by degrees to a more healthy and regulated style of living." So apparently a reasonable ration of music, Two-Steps and dreamy valses, is destined to tame for ever that ancestral savagery in us which the war has awakened. And this morning at daybreak we are departing from the village once again to bury ourselves in those wooded regions where man becomes a wolf! It is misty and the leading files of the battalion vanish from sight in a white cloud. The company preceding us is no more than a moving mass in which only the rifle barrels swaying above a crowd of heads can be distinguished. At a lesser distance forms are visible, all dull grey, but it is only when quite near that we can recognize different colours in the uniforms and see the men's breath as white puffs which quickly dissolve. Amblonville, Mouilly, and then a narrow ravine. The slope we are mounting is covered with shrubs, hazel, cherry trees, dwarf oaks and a few big trees; at the bottom of the ravine is a lake of greenness which has retained its freshness despite the autumn. In it countless shell-holes form miniature archipelagos. The opposite slope is covered with a thinly-sown wood of pines. The fog has disappeared and unveiled the sky. Idly I watch several of our men lounging near the pines. Three of them are sitting playing cards and smoking, two others standing behind them watch the game closely, commenting from time to time. A little higher up the slope a man is lying flat on his stomach, supporting his chin on his hands, and reading absorbedly, digging his toes in the soil the while.