You must not imagine that there are no inhabitants in these districts. On the contrary, it is my experience that people cling to their homes and lead their ordinary lives right up into the fire zone. Our authorities take the greatest care not to offend the inhabitants. Let me give you an illustration. Recently we were at a small village, now quite blown to atoms, and considered a hot spot even out here, and which really has no inhabitants. Well, on the occasion of entrenching operations our chaps found it necessary to take some doors from ruined houses. They wanted the timber for planks for trench supports and dug-outs. Though all the inhabitants had fled or been killed long before, and the village was little better than a dust-heap, yet a solemn and portentous court of inquiry was held on those doors: were we justified in taking them, and should payment be made for them to the old inhabitants or their representatives? Eventually it was decided that, as the doors were taken to help to make trenches, they might be considered as destroyed by a _fait de guerre_, which, I believe, corresponds to an "act of God" in the civil courts, and payment ought not therefore to be made for the doors. It was, however, pointed out that if the said doors had been used to make a road, not a trench, they would not be _faits de guerre_, and in such case payment would have had to be made to the Mayor of the destroyed commune! "Business as usual" is the motto they try to live up to throughout these parts, and every effort is made to persuade people that the war is only a sort of accident. Money remains money, and there are people selling and buying right up to places where many lives are lost every day. The position is really almost that described in a _Bystander_ cartoon, depicting a peasant standing above a line of our trenches amid a hell of shot and bursting shrapnel, and saying, "Messieurs, I am desolated to trouble you, but I must request you to fight in my other field, as I plough this one to-day." By the way, _The Bystander_ has succeeded, as no other paper save perhaps _Punch_ has done, in catching the atmosphere that exists out here.