The autumn of 1915 passed, for us, uneventfully. Our life become one of routine. At night we kept watch, warming ourselves with hot tea, boiled on little stoves in the front trenches. At dawn we would go to sleep, and at nine in the morning the day would begin for some of us, as that was the hour for the distribution of bread and sugar. Every soldier received a ration of two and a half pounds of bread daily. It was often burned on the outside and not done on the inside. At eleven o’clock, when dinner arrived, everybody was awake, cleaning rifles and generally setting things in order. The kitchen was always some distance in the rear, and some of the men were sent to bring the dinner pails to the trenches. The dinner generally consisted of a hot cabbage soup, with some meat in it. The meat was often bad. The second dish was always _kasha_, Russia’s popular gruel. Our daily ration of sugar was supposed to be three-sixteenths of a pound. By the time our dinner got to us it was cold, so that tea was resorted to again. After noon we received our orders, and at six in the evening supper arrived, this being the last meal, and consisting only of one course. It was either cabbage soup or _kasha_ or half a herring, with bread. Many ate all their bread before the supper hour, or if they were very hungry, with the first meal, and were thus forced to beg for morsels from their comrades, or go hungry in the evening. Every twelve days we were relieved and sent to the rear for a six-days’ rest. There we found ready for us the baths established by the Union of Zemstvos which in 1915 had extended its activities along the whole front. Every Divisional bath was in charge of a physician and a hundred voluntary workers. Every bath-house was also a laundry, and the men, upon entering it, left their dirty underwear there, receiving in exchange clean linen. When a company was about to leave the trenches for the rear, word was sent to the bath-house of its coming. There was nothing that the soldiers welcomed so much as the bath-house, so vermin-infested were the trenches, and so great was their suffering on this account. I suffered more than anybody else from the vermin. I could not think at first of going to the bath-house with the men. My skin was eaten through and through and scabs began to form all over my body. I went to the Commander to inquire how I could get a bath, telling him of my condition. The Commander listened with sympathy. “But what can I do, Yashka?” he said. “I can’t keep the whole Company out to let you alone make use of the bath-house. Go with the men. They respect you so much that I am sure they won’t molest you.” I could not quite make up my mind at first. But the vermin gave me no rest, and I was nearing desperation. When we were relieved next and the boys were getting ready to march to the bath-house I plucked up courage and went up to my sergeant, declaring: “I’ll go to the bath-house, too. I can’t endure it any longer.”