Now B116 is a front line trench in a re-entrant. The Hun trench facing it is also in a re-entrant, the original front lines on both sides having been crumpled and flooded out of existence. So when night fell the officer of B116 took his party and set out, and he went on and on, and then on, and there was still wire. And he went on and on and on. And there were bits of old trenches and saps and listening posts, but still wire. And he went on and on and there were more bits of trench and more wire. And he went on and on--and I know this is true because he told me--and on and on until (no, he did not come back to our own trench, he had a compass) an exceptionally good lot of fireworks went up, and he was fired at and bombed by Germans behind and Germans in front and Germans on either side, and, mind you, he was still in the wire. So he waited until all the Germans appeared to have killed each other or gone to sleep, and brought his party laboriously back to B116, from which he sent to the Next Man Up a message which ran: "If you want me to wire Bosch third line, kindly arrange for artillery preparation." It is some days now since they put up any wire in front of B116. It is a fact well known to all our most widely-circulated photographic dailies that these German gunners waste a power of ammunition. The only criticism I have to make is that I wish they would waste it more carefully. The way they go strewing the stuff about round us is such that they're bound to hit someone or something before long. Still we have only two more days in, and they seldom give us more than ten thousand shells a day. We are in billets now, and frankly, I am beginning to be very exercised about my boots. When I say "my boots" I mean rather the boots concerning me than "the boots that are mine." I wanted, some couple of months ago, a new pair of boots. I told the Quartermaster, and he looked at my then boots superciliously and said he could quite believe it. I rashly left it at that, imagining something would happen. A man like a quartermaster, who rolls in boots, would, I felt, think nothing of sending along a dozen pairs before breakfast, with a chit telling me to give away what I couldn't use. But no. It seems every boot in his store was numbered.