A German device that is new to me is the making of quagmires in front of the trenches, usually by digging extra trenches a few hundred feet from the real ones, throwing in the loose clay, and then flooding them so that you get a ditch of liquid mud. One day a French infantry detachment was advancing finely against the German position until they stumbled into one of these bogs, and just as they were stuck fast they were treated to a hail of fire. Barbed-wire entanglements are ten times worse than what we found in South Africa. Usually they are hidden away in the long grass, and you don’t see them until they catch you in the legs and bring you down. However, we’re getting up to the dodge. Now we call the wires “mug racks,” because it’s only the “mugs” who get caught in them: _A Private of a Scots Regiment_. Cave-dwellers We are like brigands at large in a cave, but one thing spoils it--that is, these blooming shells. The guns are only from six to eighteen hundred yards off, but we cannot see them on account of their being like ours, so cleverly concealed, and our aeroplanes cannot find them, although if they go over it is ten to one they are heavily fired at, but with them being so high it is impossible to see anything. We, the machine gunners, are rather lucky, as we draw our rations from the cooker where they are at present in the village, and then take them to our house that we have, and where the corporal in charge of the limber stays. He acts as cook, and we have bully stews, marrows, walnuts, turnips, and different things, and plenty of potatoes: _Pte. H. Tesseyman, Coldstream Guards_. Contour Maps It is my opinion, although, of course, I have no authority for it, that the German artillery have been supplied with contour maps of the route to Paris, with the ranges marked from hill to hill. Directly they reached an incline and faced us on another they let fly right on top of us straight away. They certainly had not time to find the range by the ordinary methods. I was wounded by a bullet from a shrapnel. It is very poor stuff, and very ineffective. The bullet that hit me ought ordinarily to have gone right through my hand. I lay for about an hour and a half on some corn, with the shrapnel bursting over me all the time. The bullets were absolutely spent, and when they dropped on my clothes they only singed them; others I stopped with my hands as they fell: _Quartermaster-Sergt. Hinton, 17th Batt. Royal Field Artillery_. A Disturbed Dinner