I manage to get a good deal of bathing these days, as there is a beautiful little river about a stone's throw away from our billets. By the way, I hope you are continuing as keen as ever on your swimming. As to leave, it has again vanished into the limbo of futurity. I am not particularly sorry. Leave is such a fleeting joy. Just as one is beginning to get into the way of things at home one has to go back again to the Front. I would much prefer to get the War completely over than get leave. After all, in my present job I am not worried by monotony, and I find the work of absorbing interest. Moreover, I have many friends in this battalion, and, above all, in our own Company, which contains some really splendid fellows. What I miss most is music. _June 10th, 1917._ There are few opportunities of writing, and the busy period is likely to last for a space, so I fear my correspondence for some time to come will be but scanty. Our northern push has been a first-rate success. The simultaneous explosion of those mines on the Messines Ridge must have created a terrific din, though I myself never heard a sound, being at the time wrapped in the sleep of the just. I do hope things are going well in the old school, but I fear that in existing conditions it is a difficult period for all public schools. Owing to the War, boys leave so much younger now, and you do not have fellows of eighteen and nineteen to set the tone; and at that age they have unquestionably a far greater sense of responsibility than at sixteen or seventeen, or, I imagine, in the first years at the 'Varsity after leaving school. Ian Hay says somewhere that a senior boy at a public school is a far more serious and responsible being than an undergraduate. As there are no senior boys, it is more than ever incumbent upon the masters to keep up the _esprit de corps_ of the school, and to help maintain the old standards in work and games.