What Ho! They are starting their evening’s shelling of —— just behind us. Their 15-in. come with a noise just like an express train—and they start on us every evening this way about 7 P.M., just by way of a little diversion after the day’s labours! ‘Boom /r-r-r-r-r-z-z-z-z-z/ splosh!’—there they go. And all this goes on whilst the birds sing, cows moo—pigs grunt—and all the other ‘beasties’ of a farm-yard perform—that is the striking feature of it all, to me anyway. The battalion was in billets after a very strenuous time. ‘Nearly all the old crowd of officers are away wounded or worse,’ as Oscar put it. His captain, his platoon sergeant, and his servant had all been severely wounded; a second-lieutenant[10] of his own standing had succeeded to the command of B Company, and Oscar realised what he had missed. ‘Oh! how I wish I had been in that scrap!’ he wrote, but added: ‘Tomorrow I shall have my “blooding—”’ and at the thought: ‘I’m as happy as a lark and a humming-bird rolled in one.’ Nearly all the rest is in the following letters and bits of letters, most of them written in the trenches under fire, those to us being numbered in the order of their arrival from the time he left. (23) The Trenches, 2/Essex Reg. 1.30 P.M. May 23, ’15. Sunday. My dearest Mummy & Daddy,—Well—here we are in the trenches—half-made and generally in a rotten condition. The Regiment that was here before us seems to have done nothing at all, except leave a mess of jam-pots etc.