Last night we moved into a commodious cellar of a house which still leans against the next. It is only five minutes from town, and tramlines pass the door. Nay more, they stop abruptly at the door--such are the improvements effected by R.E. Inside the cellar are three bits of chairs, a table-top on boxes, and an inimitable ancestral smell that no deodorizer known to modern warfare can cope with. And all this is called "Trenches!" Our servants do their best to support the official illusion by neglecting to clean our boots and regarding with surprise and some little sadness any tendency on our part to wash. But you must not imagine that life here is all honey. Even here we do a bit for our eight-and-sixpence. Every evening there comes down from the front line a report that our men there want more food. A stricter or less beneficent C.O. than ours might at once institute a court of inquiry into what has happened to all the food we gave them last night. But not so with us. "The boys want food," he says to the Adjutant, "and, by Heaven, the boys shall have it." No sooner said than handed on to someone else to do. The Adjutant works off a little bit of his strong personal dislike for me in a note, couched, if you please, in the most friendly terms, intimating that he has raised heaven and earth to get me off, but the C.O. insists that I (as the only competent officer for the task) shall supervise the conduct of our rations to the front, middle and back lines to-night. He adds that the Intelligence Corps report that information received from deserters leads us to suppose that Fritz intends to strafe all roads and communication trenches in our sector to-night. The carrying party is supplied by a sister battalion, and makes the night thoroughly well acquainted with its views about a unit that can't supply blanks to carry their blanked rations for their blanked selves. Sometimes a second or a third trip may be necessary, and then the carriers' patriotic fervour expresses itself in terms almost potent enough to do the carrying for them. For some reason or other the R.E., who design material for our porterage, consider its end and not its portability. Their special line of ready-made wire entanglements would entangle a hippopotamus; and when it comes to carrying one a mile-and-a-half you find it has no wheels, no handles, and simply won't fold up into the pocket. The usual procedure is for a man or two to roll on one of these barbed-wire death-traps until they are well stuck on them and then crawl to the point of delivery.