We have a piano, and games, and writing-materials, and a stock of candy and tobacco and chocolate and stuff like that. I haven’t tasted a single chocolate. Fact! But it has made an old man of me. Gee! I’d give that loft building on Sixteenth Street to be alone with an order of corn-starch pudding. However, barring the fact that I haven’t lost an ounce in weight, I’m having a grand time, for there’s always something to do. Details are constantly passing through, to and from the front-line trenches, which (whisper) are so close that we can smell the Germans. That’s the reason we wear nose-bags full of chloride of lime or something. Pete and I spend our days making millions of gallons of tea and coffee and cocoa, and selling canned goods, and sewing on buttons, and cracking jokes, and playing the piano, and lugging stretchers, and making doughnuts, and getting the boys to write home to mother, and various little odd jobs; then, at night, we take supplies up to the lads in the front row of the orchestra. That’s a pretty game, by the way, for a man of my size. Nobody ever undertakes to pass me in a trench; I lie down and let them climb over. It keeps the boys good-natured, and that’s part of my job. “Hill Two Eighty-five”—that’s what they call me. We had a caller to-day. One of the Krupp family dropped in on us and jazzed up the whole premises. There is Bull Durham and rice-papers and chocolate and raspberry jam all over this village, and one corner of our hut has gone away from here entirely. We haven’t found the stove, either, although Pete retrieved the damper, and the rest of it is probably somewhere near by. Of course I had nothing hot for the boys when I went up to-night. It was raining, too, and cold. But they didn’t mind. They don’t mind anything—they’re wonderful that way. We all had a good laugh over it, and they pretended they were glad it was the stove and not I that got strafed. I really believe they like me. Anyhow, they made me think they do, and I was so pleased I couldn’t resist sitting down and writing you. Altogether, it was a great day and a perfect evening. Yours till the last “down,” DIMPLES. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER V _Dimples Takes Part in a Ceremony_