At the posts, just behind the lines, where one waits for wounded to come in from the trenches, I spend idle hours, chatting or playing dominoes. Our little circle comprises a remarkable variety of types: one hears French of every patois, from the half-Spanish drawl of the Mediterranean to the clipped negatives and throaty _r_ of Paris. As inventors of racy slang we Americans are miles behind the French. Your pipe is "Mélanie" (also your sweetheart, for some unknown reason). One's mess is "la popote," a shrapnel helmet is a "casserole," a machine-gun is a "moulin à café." Bed is ironically called "plumard"; and when a bursting shell sends out its spray of buzzing steel, the cry is "Attention aux mouches!" [Look out for the flies!] Government tobacco is known, aptly, as "foin" [hay]. If one wants a cigarette, and has a paper but no tobacco, one extends the paper toward a better-provided friend saying, "Kindly sign this." And so on. _February 18_ I had an interesting day yesterday. The commandant asked for a car--he is the head medical officer--to visit some posts, and I was lucky enough to land the job. He is a charming, cultivated man, and made it very pleasant for his chauffeur. We visited a number of posts, inspecting new dugout emergency hospitals, and vaccinating the stretcher-bearers against typhoid--a most amusing process, as these middle-aged fellows have the same horror of a doctor that a child has of a dentist. Reluctant was scarcely the word. Finally we left the car (at the invitation of the artillery officer) and walked a couple of miles through the woods to see a new observation post. The last few hundred yards we made at a sneaking walk, talking only in whispers, till we came to a ladder that led up into the thick green of a pine tree. One after another the officers went up, and at length the gunner beckoned me to climb. Hidden away like a bird's nest among the fragrant pine-needles, I found a tiny platform, where the officer handed me his binoculars and pointed to a four-inch hole in the leafy screen. There right below us were two inconspicuous lines of trenches, zigzagging across a quiet field, bounded by leafless pollard willows. It was incredible to think that hundreds of men stood in those ditches, ever on the alert. At a first glance the countryside looked strangely peaceful and unhampered--farm-houses here and there, neatly hedged fields, and, farther back, a village with a white church. Look closer, though, and you see that the houses are mere shells, with crumbling walls and shattered windows; the fields are scarred and pitted with shell-holes, the village is ruined and lifeless, and the belfry of the church has collapsed. Above all, there is not an animal, not a sign of life in the fields or on the roads. Not a sound, except the distant hornet buzzing of an aeroplane.