organization of the workshops is carried out. In order to enable this to be done, the O.C. Workshops has fitted them with an office table apiece and large side windows to admit light and air, two necessaries which the original designers must have overlooked! The lorry which serves as his own office he has fitted up with an office-chair and table, cupboards, an aluminium wash-hand basin, which was cast from scrap aluminium, a gas stove, and hot-water supply apparatus, the whole equipment having been made throughout in the workshops. The interior of the lorry is also, of course, lit with electricity, and thus the O.C. Workshops is enabled to carry on his work in comfort day or night, summer or winter. _*Chapter VII*_ _*LIFE BEHIND THE LINE*_ During our stay at Fouqtiereuil, which was not, however, of long duration, we saw and heard things that to most of us, at any rate, were quite new. In the distance artillery was continually booming away, and at night the brilliant flashes of the star-shells over the trenches beyond us lit up the sky. It was not uncommon any day to see an aeroplane in the distance, followed in its passage across the sky by little puffs of white smoke, the phenomenon caused by shrapnel shells loosed off by our anti-aircraft guns on land at a hostile Taube, bursting all around it. Our next move was to Lillers, where we remained only for a short time also. Of our journeys and convoys from this railhead I give some account in a following chapter. A few days before the end of December, railhead was again moved, this time to Berguette, and here we spent our first Christmas Day. Our mess was a room in a small empty house, which certainly looked cheerless enough when we first saw it, but the O.C. Workshops very soon, with the assistance of his able artificers, produced a table and forms, rigged up a thoroughly efficient acetylene lighting plant and also a fire-grate; this latter was really a masterpiece of blacksmiths’ art. With these and many luxuries in the form of Christmas puddings and cakes sent by fond relatives at home, not forgetting a turkey locally acquired by the C.O., and some champagne of doubtful vintage, we managed to do ourselves proud. In all the different places in which we have been stationed, whether our mess has been a brickyard, a deserted house, a barn or a tent, the ingenuity of O.C. Workshops and his contrivances to produce light, heat, and such-like cardinal comforts have never failed us. A man who has spent years in the wilds of Africa and is accustomed to making himself always comfortable and thoroughly at home amid the most unpromising surroundings—even amongst the haunts of the man-eating lions of Tsavo or the snowy summits of the Klondyke—and who is also an engineer and an inventive genius, is a distinct acquisition to any unit on active service.