The Officers’ mess at the most advanced station of the Royal Flying Corps on the Somme front. The great tent was designed as an aeroplane hangar. An R.F.C. mess usually has an atmosphere of its own. There is more variety of apparel than at other messes; there are more dogs; personal mascots abound, and in many ways there is more expression of individual choice or peculiarity than elsewhere--corresponding, perhaps, to the more individual character of a flying officer’s work and responsibilities and to the temperament which leads to success in flying. The officers are drawn from all sorts of regiments, and each continues to wear his regimental badge. It is winter, and the second figure from the left is wearing a fur jacket. [Illustration] XXXIV WATCHING OUR ARTILLERY FIRE ON TRONES WOOD FROM MONTAUBAN The drawing expresses well the singular aspect of the parts of the battlefield where artillery fire was heavy and where the conical holes made in the ground by high explosive shells were consequently close together. At a later stage these separate pock-marks overlap, like the pits in confluent small-pox, and the whole of the shelled ground becomes soft and loose, as though raked deeply but unevenly. In the distance the detached higher puffs of smoke from bursting shrapnel are distinguishable from the rising clouds of smoke from high-explosive shells. [Illustration] XXXV (a and b) IN THE REGAINED TERRITORY Both the places drawn were in German hands until July. The first drawing is of a cemetery found behind the old German front line near Fricourt. There were many imperfectly marked German graves near these. They have since been marked, as many thousands of hurriedly made British graves have been, with wooden crosses and metal inscriptions by our Graves’ Registration and Inquiries Units. The second drawing, with a helmeted sentry at the sand-bagged entrance to a dug-out, conveys the sinister air of a village destroyed, but not quite effaced, by shell-fire. [Illustration] [Illustration] XXXVI A V.A.D. REST STATION At a base railway station in France. Between the arrivals of hospital trains from the front the V.A.D. workers occupy themselves in the “dispensary” in rolling bandages or preparing hot cocoa and other food for the wounded or sick men who will pass through the station. [Illustration] XXXVII A GATEWAY AT ARRAS A few hundred yards from this gate the Anglo-French treaty of peace was signed after Agincourt. Part of the city’s later history is written in the curious and beautiful Spanish architecture of its chief squares. It is now in the middle stage of destruction: almost every building is shattered or injured, but enough is standing to make the empty city seem still sensitive, in its very stones, under the enemy’s random shellfire. [Illustration] XXXVIII OUTSIDE ARRAS, NEAR THE GERMAN LINES