Part of our job is to read the men’s letters and censor them: our men are extraordinarily good at their work and I never wish for any better, but, taken all round, their letter-writing is not very original. This is not perhaps to be wondered at, as they are not allowed to give any news of the war, and they of course know that everything they write is to be censored. About the only topics that are discussed at all are the two most primitive ones, consisting chiefly of requests for food and raiment, and the sending of loves and kisses, the more indiscriminate the better. One hero wrote four identical letters to four different girls. One’s own time for letter-writing is limited, and this effusion has taken parts of three whole days to write. It is done in the intervals of flying; testing bombs and detonators and other fireworks, with which we try to enliven things occasionally; seeing after guns, engines and machines; avoiding Staff officers; trying to talk French to Belgian N.C.O.s who are lent to us with their men for making improvements to our aerodrome; and other work, such as drawing maps to satisfy the insatiable curiosity of the G.O.C., and devising means to appease the voracity of the fellow members of one’s mess. Now I am sitting on the ground under a sort of tent, where bits of my engine are being improved by my expert mechanic, and I am writing on a tin of castor-oil. My finger is still bandaged up, so the pencil is not very easy to work. After yesterday’s fine summer-day, of course it is foggy and cold, raining and drizzling, so no one can fly, as nothing can be seen; and there is a peaceful feel and a busy hum of machine tools in camp. On the last foggy day that we were up, we saw something suddenly loom out of the fog, and, thinking it might be a Hun machine, swerved towards it, but only for a second; luckily we swerved off again just in time to miss the cock on top of the steeple of a well-known church on a hill by a few feet—very unpleasant!—the ground being invisible at the time. One evening, on the way out for a raid, I came across a large eagle, flying at about fifteen hundred feet. The surprise was mutual. It was the first time in my life that I saw one of these fine birds completely lose its head, and in an attempt to avoid what it probably thought was a super-eagle, it warped its wings the wrong way and actually side-slipped like a badly flown aeroplane, falling—headlong—a few hundred feet. The last we saw of it, it had recovered, and was flying rapidly away in the opposite direction. * * * * *