At first the weather was very hot, which made the work for the troops very hard. The machine I had soon struck work, and was left to be handed over to the Kaiser as a souvenir; and several other machines gave up the ghost in like manner. When a machine went wrong, it was left and a new one took its place--the list of casualties for motors of every sort is an amazingly heavy one; but casualties were inevitable, because in many places the roads that we had to take were perfect nightmares. It was very hard going till we got used to it. During the first month at the front I had my boots off about three times--I am now wearing my fourth pair, which is an average of one a month--and we reckoned that we were lucky if we slept in a barn, with straw; if we couldn’t manage that we turned in anywhere, in our greatcoats. When I say sleep, I mean lying down for an hour or two, as sometimes we did not billet till dark. Then we had some grub, anything we could get, and after that a message. Next day we were off, five times out of six, at 3.30 to four o’clock, and got long, hard days in. Amongst the messages we had to carry there were none more urgent than those which were sent for reinforcements, the men upon whose coming the issue of a battle depended. It was tear and scurry all along, but somehow the message would get delivered all right and the reinforcements would hurry up and save the situation. Often enough a message would be delivered at midnight to a tired officer who was living in a dug-out, and I scarcely ever reached one of these warrens without being invited to take something of whatever was going--it might be a drink of hot coffee, with a biscuit, or a tot of rum, which was truly grateful after a bitter ride. That is the only thing in the way of alcoholic drink at the front, and very little of it. This is, for the British, a teetotal war; but for the Germans it has been the very reverse, and time after time we came across evidence of their drunken debauches. The shell fire was so incessant that it was soon taken as part of the day’s work. At first it was terrible, though one got used to it. My first experience of rifle fire did not come until I had been at the front for some weeks, and then I was surprised to find what a comparatively small thing it is compared with shells--it is not nearly so bad.