Home again! The base softened its heart on the very morning on which I had practically decided to attend a parade next day if I were called in time, and released me with an enormous command to conduct to the War. I told the senior N.C.O. at the station of entrainment that I would regard him as personally responsible if he dropped any of the men on the line or under the engine on the way up, and was just off to look for food when the R.T.O. told me the train was due out in two minutes. After making quite sure that he wasn't a Major I reminded him that for that matter the War had been due to be over last September; also that I had used some of his trains before and that he couldn't teach me two-pennyworth about them I hadn't known from childhood. This I said courteously but firmly, and thereafter felt better and bought eight boiled eggs, a ham sandwich made so hastily that the ham came to be altogether omitted, three oranges, and a large mineral-water. The train was in the station for three-quarters-of-an-hour after I returned. I passed the time pleasantly by walking up and down in front of the R.T.O. And now I am here. Glory apart, I could think for a long time without hitting on anywhere beastlier to be except perhaps just the other side of a breastwork thirty yards off where the Bosch has been dropping heavy crumps in threes with monotonous regularity since an indecent hour this morning. I have been partly asleep, partly waiting for one to drop thirty yards short. There is no one to talk to except a chaffinch, who thinks of nothing but his appearance. If I thought of mine I should go mad. I am wet under and through and over everything--wet, not with rain, but with mud. You have heard that there is mud in Flanders? But the worst part really is the number of hours in a day; we have as many as ten nowadays in which movement is simply not done. Where dawn finds you, dusk releases you. That is here; I believe we have some real trenches somewhere behind. But we of the ten hours' stretch run out of employment early in the morning and remain there the rest of the day. Of course you can eat--if your rations really came up last night--but not, I think, continuously for ten hours. A very inferior officer--not I--has invented a recipe for the ten-hour day which may appeal to some similarly loose-ended officer. You take an air-pillow and lie with your gum-booted feet on it till the position becomes intolerable; then you remove the pillow, sit up and pick the mud off it. When it's clean you do the same thing again. One tour of this duty will take an hour if you are conscientious. Its inventor claims that it makes the sun fairly bustle down the sky.