Personally I think this is the meanest country to get about in during the day time that I can possibly imagine. It is almost as flat as a billiard table, and I am of the opinion that if you lay down in the road you could see a black pin sticking up in it a mile away. Everything around you is as still as death for perhaps ten minutes. The sun shines, butterflies flit about and an occasional bee goes droning past. There is nothing whatever to suggest the possibility of war. You think it is a mistake and that you are at least twenty miles from the Front; then you hear a deep detonation not far away and a great smoking crater in a field near by indicates where a heavy shell has burst. Again there is absolute silence for perhaps twenty minutes, when a sharp report not far away causes you to look quickly toward a grove of trees in a neighbouring field where you discover one of the Russian batteries. Leaving our motor we walk across a field and approach the site of a destroyed village, if a cluster of six or eight little cottages could ever have been dignified by that name. Now only a chimney here, or a few walls there, indicates where once stood this little group of homes. In one of the ruins, like a dog in an ash-heap, lives the Colonel of the --th Siberian with his staff. Behind a wall left standing is a table and a few chairs, and dug out of the corner is a bomb proof where converge telephones from the trenches in which are his troops. Here he has been living since the middle of last January. The village was destroyed months and months ago, and clearly as it is in the line of German observation it seems to provide a comparatively safe retreat for the officers, though as one of them remarked quite casually, “They dropped thirty-five shells round us yesterday, but you see nothing much came of it.” Absolute indifference to these situations is the keynote at the Front, and good form makes one refrain from asking the numerous questions as to the exact location of the enemy, whether or not they can see us, and other subjects which, at the moment, seem to us of first-class importance. However, we realize that good taste requires that we assume the same casual attitude, and so we sit for half an hour, smoke cigarettes and quietly hope that the enemy will choose some other target than this for their afternoon practice which, as one of the officers remarked, “Usually begins about this hour in the afternoon.”