Tudway and Square-Peg have accused me of being cold-blooded over the affair. But I intended to be nothing if not practical, and the next morning discovered that any shell of average intentions, in fact one falling ten feet shorter than the very one that had plugged into my bedroom wall up above, would have no difficulty in going through the mess roof and so through the mess cupboard--a large receptacle into the wall--into our so-called impregnable bedroom which was to be the emergency shelter for all hands. My bed was just beyond the cupboard the other side of the three-foot wall. So this evening when Tudway went to the cupboard for the jam and meat and bread he found a solid wall of tins filled with earth. This he considered a master-stroke. The provisions, as he explained, would have been directly in the line of fire! Moreover, I have had removed a score or two of loose bricks which were wedged in the best Damocletian style between the joists and the ceiling. For last night I dreamed one fell on my head. Why my head is always in the line of trouble I can't say. Talking of dreams, that is the second nasty one in a few days. The previous time I dreamed I was being hung. That was probably due to a button that I had sewn on to the neck of my pyjama jacket by the uncertain light of dubbin oil! _10 p.m._--There is heavy and continuous firing downstream. I respectfully suggest a variation of Watts's "Hope"--that popular picture. A junior sub asleep in a barricaded corner of a room in Kut beside a four-ounce slice of bread, listening in his dreams to distant guns. I must now make one of the most important entries of the whole siege. General Smith gave me a _Punch_. I mean that having finished with a copy of _Punch_, sent to him by aeroplane, he has passed it on to me. Shakespeare, Thackeray, and Punch. In the flesh, what friends those three would have been! "If," writes an unborn Teufeldrockh, "I were not a German, I would like to be Punch." "If," replies Punch, with a dignified bow, "you were not a German, you could aspire." For what duellist but that great English gentleman Punch has the seeing eye, the delicate wrist, the merciful smile? _March 26th._--I am in Indian khaki again, for summer has come to Kut. It is even getting unpleasantly warm. The massaging has decreased the rheumatics if anything, although I am very much weaker and can't walk 400 yards without getting blown. It is worth while to avoid the chaff bread, and I stick to an occasional egg and rice-husk and soup. How fit I was when I started on this front! Square-Peg was seedy yesterday and in pain. I gave him some essence of ginger tabloids, and later on opium, which relieved him somewhat. It is rumoured that the 6-inch guns from home have at last reached Gorringe. The enemy is now completely outclassed in artillery.