The installation of these bathing-stations was the idea of a young officer of the R.A.M.C. It frequently happens in our army in the field that, if a man happens on a good idea, he is told to go “ahead with it.” This young doctor’s idea was a very happy one, and he “went ahead with it” to such good purpose that it was copied, and, as I have said, “bathing-stations” were arranged throughout the army. They are now show-places to which the distinguished visitor is invariably conducted. It is whispered that sometimes, when these visits have been arranged at short notice, bathers are not available, so a squad of men, who perhaps had had their bath the day before, are ordered to the bath and are solemnly washed again. Though perhaps on these occasions the clothing and bodies of the men seem surprisingly clean, the visitors to the “star” bathing-station, where personages of note are always conducted, can see “the real thing” in the shape of a lamentable garment preserved between two sheets of glass. It is known as “The Lousy Shirt,” and is an indisputably genuine relic of winter, literally covered with the cremated remains of hundreds of this most unconventional insect. The doctor in charge of the bathing-station declares his intention of presenting the shirt to the United Service Museum after the war. In many parts of the line, where the German rarely desists from “frightfulness,” the troops waiting their turn in the trenches live entirely in dug-outs, as such houses as are still standing are not safe owing to shell-fire. A dug-out is, as its name implies, a shelter scraped out of the ground, the earth being laid on timbers placed crosswise on top. A dug-out will afford adequate cover against bullets and shrapnel and splinters of shell. It will not as a rule, unless quite exceptionally solid, resist a direct hit by a shell. If a dug-out is struck fair and square in this way, its occupants seldom escape. Some of the dug-outs I have seen were models of neatness and ingenuity. One in particular, used as regimental headquarters in a village that had been totally destroyed--the 2nd Worcesters, the heroes of Gheluvelt, were there when I visited it in June--was reached by a neat flight of wooden steps and had practicable casement windows. Walls and roof were papered in an artistic shade of green, linoleum was on the floor, a mirror and coloured prints of General Joffre and Sir John French hung on the walls, and there were tables and chairs in addition to a camp-bed in a corner. A pigeon-hole with a slide in one wall gave access to a second room, “the office.” The place was dry and well ventilated. It had a great local reputation as the “super-dug-out.” A framed notice on the wall proudly attested the fact that it had been visited by H.R.H. the Prince of Wales. Round about Ypres, where the country has been laid waste by shell-fire, everybody lives in dug-outs.