MY DEAR DICK,—When you went out from the breastwork that night, along the little muddy path, and whispered me a laughing _au revoir_, I thought no more of it than of a hundred similar episodes that made up day and night in these mad, half-romantic, unbelievable times. There was nothing especial to make the incident memorable. It was ten o’clock at night and the second relief for the sniper pits had gone out half an hour or so. A frost had started after the previous day’s cold rain, the water-filled crump holes had iced over and the so-called paths through the wood were deceptively firm looking, though in reality one’s feet and legs sank through the ice a foot deep into that ghastly, sticky foot-trodden mud. I knew your job—to visit the listening patrols and the snipers on the edge of the wood—and I remember thinking that your habit of going out alone without an orderly was foolish, near though the posts might be to the breastworks. However, you were young—four and twenty isn’t a great age, Dick—and I recalled your saying that you would no more think of taking an orderly than of asking a policeman to pilot you across Piccadilly Circus. The wood was fairly quiet that night, though there were the usual bursts of machine-gun fire, the stray ping of high rifle shots against the branches of the trees, and the noisy barking of that fussy field battery of ours which always seemed to want to turn night into day. The light of the moon let me see you disappear into the shadows, and I heard the scrunch of your feet as you picked between the tree trunks a gingerly way. Then I went along the breastwork line, saw that all was right, found Peter munching chocolate and reading a month-old copy of _The Horse-Breeders’ Gazette_!—fellows read such funny literature in war time—in his dug-out—and myself turned down the corduroy path to the splinter-proof hut that you so excellently named ‘The Château.’ Dennis and Pip had already turned in and had left me an uncomfortably narrow space to lie down beside them, and they were daintily snoring. Through the partition beyond I heard our company servants doing the same, only with greater vigour in their snore. But my bed was already prepared, the straw was only moderately dirty and odorous, and after ridding my boots with a scraper of some portion of the mud, I thrust my feet into the sand-bags, lay down, coiled myself up comfy in my bag and blankets and went to sleep. For ten minutes only. Then I suddenly awakened into full consciousness and found myself sitting up staring into the darkness, and the chinks of moonlight coming in below and at the sides of the ill-fitting door. I was listening intently too, and I did not know why. The wood was absolutely quiet at the moment, and Dennis, Pip, and the servants had all settled off into their second sleep where snoring is an intrusion.