A
"Temporary Gentleman"
in France

Home Letters from an Officer at the Front

With Introductory Chapters by
Captain A. J. Dawson
Border Regiment (British Forces)

G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1918

Copyright, 1918

BY

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

PUBLISHERS' NOTE

Permission has been given by the British War Office for the publication of this series of Letters written by a Temporary Officer of the New Army. No alteration has been made in the Letters to prepare them for the Press beyond the deleting or changing, for obvious reasons, of certain names used.

BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

The writer has introduced this "Temporary Gentleman" to many good fellows in England, France, and Flanders, and is very anxious to introduce him on a really friendly footing to all his brothers-in-arms across the Atlantic; from New York to San Francisco, and from Quebec to Vancouver Island, also. But how best to do it? It really is no very easy matter, this, to present one simple, very human unit of the New Armies, to a hundred millions of people.

"Dear America: Herewith please find one slightly damaged but wholly decent 'Temporary Gentleman' who you will find repays consideration."

I think that is strictly true, and though, in a way, it covers the ground, it does not, somehow, seem wholly adequate; and I have an uncomfortable feeling that the critics might find in it ground for severe comments. But it is just what I mean; and I would be well content that all the kindly men and women of America should just find out about this "Temporary Gentleman" for themselves, and form their own opinion, rather than that I should set down things about him in advance. If these letters of his do not commend him to America's heart and judgment, I am very sure no words of mine would stand any chance of doing so. Yes, for my part, warmly anxious as I am for America to know him, and to feel towards him as folk do in France and Flanders and Britain, I am perfectly prepared to let him stand or fall upon his own letters, which certainly discover the man to you, whatever you may think of him.

Withal, in case it may interest any among the millions of American families from which some member has gone out to train and to fight, to save the Allied democracies of the world from being over-ridden by the murderous aggression of its remaining autocracies, I take pleasure in testifying here to the fact that among the officers now serving in Britain's New Armies (as among those who, whilst serving, have passed to their long rest) are very many thousands who are just for all the world like the writer of these letters. I have watched and spoken with whole cadet-training battalions of them, seen them march past in column of fours, chins well up, arms aswing, eyes front, and hearts beating high with glad determination and pride—just because their chance has nearly come for doing precisely what the writer of these letters did: for treading the exact track he blazed, away back there in 1915; for the right to offer the same sort of effort he made, for God and King and Country; to guard the Right, and avenge the Wrong, and to shield Christendom and its liberties from a menace more deadly than any that the world's admitted barbarians and heathens ever offered.

I know there are very many thousands of them who are just like this particular "Temporary Gentleman,"—even as there must be many thousands of his like in America,—because there have been so many among those with whom I have lived and worked and fought, in the trenches. And it does seem to me, after study of the letters, that this statement forms something of a tribute to the spirit, the efficiency, and the devotion to their duty, of the whole tribe of the Temporary Officers.

Their lost sense of humour (withered out of existence, I take it, by the poison gas of Prussian Kultur) would seem to have made the German nation literally incapable of forming an approximately correct estimate of the capacities of any people outside the confines of their own machine-made, despotically ordered State, in which public sentiment and opinion is manufactured from "sealed pattern" recipes kept under lock and key in Potsdam and the Wilhelmstrasse. Their blunders in psychology since July, 1914, would have formed an unparalleled comedy of errors, if they had not, instead, produced a tragedy unequalled in history. With regard to America alone, the record of their mistakes and misreadings would fill a stout volume. In the earlier days of the War, I read many German statements which purported (very solemnly) to prove:

(a) That in the beginning of the War they killed off all the British officers.

(b) That the British officer material had long since been exhausted.

(c) That, since it was impossible for the British to produce more officers, they could not by any effort place a really big Army in the field.

And the queer thing is that German machine-made illusions are of cast-iron. They "stay put"; permanently. During 1917 I read again precisely the same fatuous German statement regarding America and her inability to produce an army, that one read in 1914 and 1915 about Britain. The British New Armies (which Germany affirmed could never seriously count) have succeeded in capturing nearly three times as many prisoners as they have lost, and more than four times as many guns. From 1916 onward they steadily hammered back the greatest concentrations of German military might that Hindenburg could put up, and did not lose in the whole period as much ground as they have won in a single day from the Kaiser's legions. Yet still, in 1917, the same ostrich-like German scribes, who vowed that Britain could not put an army in the field because they could never officer it, were repeating precisely the same foolish talk about America and her New Armies.

Perhaps there is only one argument which Germany is now really able to appreciate. That argument has been pointedly, and very effectively, presented for some time past by the writer of these letters, and all his comrades. From this stage onward, it will further be pressed home upon the German by the armies of America, whose potentialities he has laboriously professed to ridicule. It is the argument of high explosive and cold steel; the only argument capable of bringing ultimate conviction to the Wilhelmstrasse that the English-speaking peoples, though they may know nothing of the goose-step, yet are not wont to cry "Kamerad," or to offer surrender to any other people on earth.

I know very well that the writer of these letters had no thought as he wrote—back there in 1916—of any kind of argument or reply to Potsdamed fantasies. But yet I would submit that, all unwittingly, he has furnished in these letters (on America's behalf, as well as Britain's) what should prove for unprejudiced readers outside Germany a singularly telling answer to the Boche's foolish boasts of the Anglo-Saxon inability to produce officers. As a correspondent in the Press recently wrote: "Why, for generations past the English-speaking peoples have been officering the world and all its waters—especially its waters!" And so they have, as all the world outside Germany knows, from the Yukon to Tierra del Fuego; from the Atlantic round through the Philippines to the golden gate and back.

It is a high sense of honour, horse sense, and sportsmanship, in our Anglo-Saxon sense, that lie at the root of successful leadership. And one of Prussia's craziest illusions was that with us, these qualities were the sole monopoly of the men who kept polo ponies and automobiles!

Only the guns of the Allies and the steel of their dauntless infantrymen can enlighten a people so hopelessly deluded as the Germans of to-day. But for the rest of the world I believe there is much in this little collection of the frank, unstudied writings of an average New Army officer, who, prior to the War, was a clerk in a suburban office, to show that sportsmanship and leadership are qualities characteristic of every single division of the Anglo-Saxon social systems; and that, perhaps more readily than any other race, we can produce from every class and every country in the English-speaking half of the world, men who make the finest possible kind of active service officers; men who, though their commissions may be "Temporary" and their names innocent of a "von," or any other prefix, are not only fine officers, but, permanently, and by nature, gentlemen and sportsmen.

Withal, it may be that I should be falling short of complete fulfilment of a duty which I am glad and proud to discharge, if I omitted to furnish any further information regarding the personality of the writer of these letters. And so, if the reader will excuse yet another page or two of wire entanglement between himself and the actual trenches—the letters, I mean—I will try to explain.

A. J. Dawson,
Captain.

London, 1918.

THE GENESIS OF THE "TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN"

In the case of the Service Battalion officer of Britain's New Army who, with humorous modesty, signs himself "Your 'Temporary Gentleman,'" what is there behind that enigmatic signature that his letters do not tell us? The first of these homely epistles shows their writer arriving with his Battalion in France; and the visit is evidently his first to that fair land, since he writes: "I wonder if I should ever have seen it had there been no war!" That exclamation tells a good deal.

But of the man and his antecedents prior to that moment of landing with his unit in France, the letters tell us nothing; and if it be true that the war has meant being "born again" for very many Englishmen, that frequently quoted statement at all events points to the enjoyment of some definite status before the war.

Inquiry in this particular case speedily brings home to one the fact that one is investigating the antecedents of a well-recognised New Army type, a thoroughly representative type, as well as those of an individual. In his antecedents, as in the revolutionary development which the war has brought to him, this "Temporary Gentleman" is clearly one among very many thousands who have, so to say, passed through the same crucibles, been submitted to the same standard tests, and emerged in the trenches of France and Flanders, in Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia, in Africa, and in other places in which the common enemy has endeavoured to uphold his proposed substitution of Kultur for civilisation, as we understand it.

In the year 1896 there died, in a south-western suburb of London, a builder and contractor in a small, suburban way of business. An industrious, striving, kindly, and honourable man, he had had a number of different irons in the fire, as the saying goes, and some of them, it may be, would have provided a good reward for his industry if he had lived. As the event proved, however, the winding-up of his affairs produced for his widow a sum representing no more than maintenance upon a very modest scale of a period of perhaps three years. The widow was not alone in the world. She had a little daughter, aged five, and a sturdy son, aged eight years. Nineteen years later that boy, into whose youth and early training not even the mention of anything military ever crept, was writing letters home from fire trenches in France, and signing them "Your 'Temporary Gentleman.'"

For seven years after his father's death the boy attended a day school in Brixton. The tuition he there received was probably inferior in many ways to that which would have fallen to his lot in one of the big establishments presided over by the County Council. But his mother's severely straitened circumstances had rather strengthened than lowered her natural pride; and she preferred to enlarge the sphere of her necessary sacrifices, and by the practice of the extremest thrift and industry to provide for the teaching of her two children at private schools. The life of the fatherless little family was necessarily a narrow one; its horizon was severely restricted, but its respectability was unimpeachable; and within the close-set walls of the little Brixton home there never was seen any trace of baseness, of coarseness, or of what is called vulgarity. The boy grew up in an atmosphere of reticence and modesty, in which the dominant factors were thrift, duty, conscientiousness, and deep-rooted family affection.

The first epoch of his fatherless life closed when our "Temporary Gentleman" left school, at the age of fifteen, and mounted a stool in the office of a local auctioneer and estate agent, who, in the previous decade, had had satisfactory business dealings with the youth's father. This notable event introduced some change into the quiet little mother-ruled ménage; for, in a sense, it had to be recognised that, with the bringing home of his first week's pay, the boy threatened to become a man. The patient mother was at once proud and a little disconcerted. But, upon the whole, pride ruled. The boy's mannishness, brought up as he had been, did not take on any very disconcerting shapes, though the first cigarette he produced in the house, not very long after the conclusion of the South African War, did prove something of a disturbing element just at first.

The South African War affected this little household, perhaps, as much as it would have been affected by a disastrous famine in China. It came before the period at which the son of the house started bringing home an evening newspaper, and while the only periodicals to enter the home were still The Boy's Own Paper and a weekly journal concerned with dressmaking and patterns. As a topic of conversation it was not mentioned half a dozen times in that household from first to last.

The next really great event in the life of the auctioneer's clerk was his purchase of a bicycle, which, whilst catastrophic in its effect upon his Post Office Savings Bank account, was in other respects a source of great happiness to him. And if it meant something of a wrench to his mother, as a thing calculated to remove her boy a little farther beyond the narrow confines of the sphere of her exclusive domination, she never allowed a hint of this to appear. Her son's admirable physique had long been a source of considerable pride to her; and she had wisely encouraged his assiduity in the Polytechnic gymnasium of which he was a valued supporter.

For the youth himself, his bicycle gave him the key of a new world, whilst robbing the cricket and football clubs to which he belonged of a distinctly useful member. He became an amateur of rural topography, learned in all the highways and by-ways of the southern Home Counties. His radius may not have exceeded fifty miles, but yet his bicycle interpreted England to him in a new light, as something infinitely greater and more beautiful than Brixton.

Quietly, evenly, the years slid by. The boy became a youth and the youth a man; and, in a modest way, the man prospered, becoming the most important person, next to its proprietor, in the estate agent's business. The mother's life became easier, and the sister (who had become a school-teacher) owed many little comforts and pleasures to the consistent kindliness of one who now was admittedly the head of the little household and its chief provider. He never gave a thought to the State or felt the smallest kind of interest in politics; yet his life was in no way self-centred or selfish, but, on the contrary, one in which the chief motive was the service of those nearest and dearest to him. Whilst rarely looking inward, his outward vision was bounded by the horizon of his well-ordered little home, of the Home Counties he had learned to love, and of the south-coast seaside village in which the family spent a happy fortnight every summer.

They were in that little seaside village when the Huns decreed war and desolation for Europe in August, 1914, and the three were a good deal upset about the whole business, for it interfered with the railway service, and broke in very unpleasantly upon the holiday atmosphere, which, coming as it did for but one fortnight in each year, was exceedingly precious to the little family. However, with the Englishman's instinct for clinging to the established order, with all the national hatred of disturbance, they clung as far as possible to the measured pleasantness of their holiday routine, and, after a week, returned to the workaday round of life in Brixton.

Then began a time of peculiar stress and anxiety for the little household, the dominating factor in which was the growing strangeness, as it seemed to them, of its actual head and ruler; of the man in the house. At first he talked a great deal of the war, the overpowering news of the day, and he passed many scathing criticisms upon the conduct of the authorities in their handling of the first stages of the monstrous work of preparation. He had much to say of their blunders and oversights; and somewhat, too, of what he called their criminal unpreparedness. He stopped talking rather abruptly at breakfast one morning; and one of the headlines which subsequently caught the eyes of his sister, in the newspaper her brother had propped against the coffee-pot, put this inquiry, in bold black type:

"WHOSE FAULT IS IT, MR. CITIZEN, THAT THE COUNTRY IS UTTERLY UNPREPARED FOR WAR?"

Those nightmarish early days of the great war slowly succeeded one another, and the mother and daughter grew perturbed over the change they saw creeping over their man. He talked hardly at all now. All the old cheery, kindly good humour which had provided half the sunshine of their lives seemed to be disappearing and giving place to a queer, nervous, morose sort of depression. It was as if their man lived a double life. Clearly he was much affected, even absorbed, by some mental process which he never so much as mentioned to them. Morning and evening they saw him, and yet it was as though he was not there, as though he lived and had his being in some other world, aloof from the old cosy, familiar, shared world in which they had always been together. The house-wifely eye of his mother noted with something like alarm that his bedroom candlestick required a fresh candle every day. One had been wont to serve him for a fortnight. Always, she thought he would unburden himself when he kissed her good-night. But he said never a word; and the nerve strain in the little household, which had been so quietly happy and bright, became almost unendurable.

Then the end came, with the beginning of the third week in September. The evening was extraordinarily peaceful and fine. The sister and a girl friend were at the little cottage piano. The visitor had a rather rich contralto voice, and sang with considerable feeling. In the middle of her third song the master of the house rose abruptly and walked out of the room, closing the door sharply behind him. The song was one of those called a "recruiting song." Late that night, when the visitor had departed, the brother apologised to his mother and sister for leaving them so abruptly, and spoke of a sudden headache. And the next evening he brought home the devastating news that he had enlisted, and would be leaving them next day for a military depot.

The news was received in dead silence. In some mysterious way neither of the women had contemplated this as possible. For others, yes. For their man—the thing was too wildly, remotely strange to be possible. There was his business; and, besides—It was merely impossible. And now he was an enlisted soldier, he told them. But, though they hardly suspected it, not being given to the practice of introspection, their man was not the only member of the little household in whom a fundamental and revolutionary change had been wrought by the world-shaking news of the past six weeks. In the end the women kissed their man, and the central fact of his astounding intelligence was not discussed at all. They proceeded direct to practical, material arrangements. But when the time came for her good-night kiss, the mother said, very quietly, "God bless you, dear!"; and the sister smiled and showed a new pride through the wet gleam of her eyes.

And then the auctioneer's clerk disappeared from the peaceful purlieus of Brixton and went out alone into an entirely new world, the like of which had never presented itself to his fancy, even in dreams. He became one of fifteen men whose home was a bell tent designed to give easy shelter to perhaps half that number. He began to spend his days in a routine of drill which, even to him with his gymnasium training, seemed most singularly tiresome and meaningless—at first.

At the end of four weeks he returned home for a Saturday night and Sunday in the Brixton house; and he wore one stripe on the sleeve of his service jacket. To his intelligence there now was nothing in the whole intricate round of section, platoon, and company drill which was meaningless, however wearing it might sometimes seem. There was a tan on his cheeks, a clear brightness in his eyes, an alert swing in his carriage, and a surprisingly crisp ring in his voice which at once bewildered and delighted his womenfolk. He seemed not so much a new man as the man whom they had always loved and respected, in some subtle way magnified, developed, tuned up, brought to concert pitch.

In November he was advised by his Company Commander to apply for a Commission. The officer badly wanted him for a Sergeant, but this officer had long since learned to place duty first and inclination a long way behind; and it was apparent to him that in this tall, alert Lance-Corporal of his, as in so many hundreds of other men in the ranks, there was the making of a good officer.

Shortly before Christmas, 1914, he was gazetted a Second Lieutenant, and on New Year's Day he found himself walking across a parade ground to take his place in front of the platoon he subsequently led in France, after long months of arduous training in several different English camps.

Three-quarters of a year passed between the day of this "Temporary Gentleman's" enlistment and his writing of the first of the letters now published over his pseudonym; and it may well be that all the previous years of his life put together produced no greater modification and development in the man than came to him in those nine months of training for the New Army. The training had its bookish side, for he was very thorough; but it was in the open air from dawn till dark, and ninety per cent. of it came to him in the process of training others.

The keynotes of the training were noblesse oblige, sportsmanship and responsibility, that form of "playing the game" which is at the root of the discipline of the British Army. While he taught the men of his platoon they taught him, in every hour of the day and many hours of the night. They learned to call him "A pretty good sort," which is very high praise indeed. And he learned to be as jealous of his men as any mother can be of her children. He learned to know them, in fair weather and in foul, for the splendid fellows they are; and in the intensely proud depths of his own inner consciousness to regard them as the finest platoon in the New Army.

And then came the longed-for day of the departure for France, for the land he was to learn to love, despite all the horrors of its long fighting line, just as he learned most affectionately to admire the men and reverence the women of brave, beautiful France. In the letters that he wrote from France he had, of course, no faintest thought of the ultimate test of publication. That is one reason why his name is not now attached to documents so intimate, even apart from the sufficiently obvious military reasons.

A. J. D.

CONTENTS

A "Temporary Gentleman" in France

THE FIRST LETTER

Here we are at last, "Somewhere in France," and I suppose this will be the first letter you have ever had from your "Temporary Gentleman" which hasn't a stamp on it. It is rather nice to be able to post without stamps, and I hope the Censor will find nothing to object to in what I write. It's hard to know where to begin.

Here we are "at last," I say—we were nearly a year training at home, you know—and I shall not easily forget our coming. It really was a wonderful journey from Salisbury Plain, with never a hitch of any sort or kind, or so much as a buttonstick gone astray. Someone with a pretty good head-piece must arrange these things. At ten minutes to three this morning we were on the parade ground at —— over a thousand strong. At twenty minutes to eleven we marched down the wharf here at ——, well, somewhere in France; and soon after twelve the cook-house bugle went in this camp, high up on a hill outside the town, and we had our first meal in France—less than eight hours from our huts on the Plain; not quite the Front yet, but La Belle France, all the same. I wonder if I should ever have seen it had there been no war?

Our transport, horses, mules, and limbers had gone on ahead by another route. But, you know, the carrying of over a thousand men is no small matter, when you accomplish it silently, without delay, and with all the compact precision of a battalion parade, as this move of ours was managed. Three minutes after our train drew up at the harbour station, over there in England, the four companies, led by Headquarters Staff, and the band (with our regimental hound pacing in front) were marching down the wharf in column of route, with a good swing. There were four gangways, and we filed on board the steamer as if it had been the barrack square. Then off packs and into lifebelts every man; and in ten minutes the Battalion was eating its haversack breakfast ration, and the steamer was nosing out to the open sea, heading for France, the Front, and Glory.

The trip across was a stirring experience in its way too. The wide sea, after all, is just as open to the Boche as to us, and he is pretty well off for killing craft and mines. Yet, although through these long months we have been carrying troops to and fro every day, not once has he been able to check us in the Channel. The way the Navy's done its job is—it's just a miracle of British discipline and efficiency. All across the yellow foam-flecked sea our path was marked out for us like a racecourse, and outside the track we could see the busy little mine-sweepers hustling to and fro at their police work, guarding the highway for the British Army. Not far from us, grim and low, like a greyhound extended, a destroyer slid along: our escort.

The thing thrilled you, like a scene in a play; the quiet Masters of the Sea guarding us on our way to fight the blustering, boastful, would-be stealers of the earth. And from first to last I never heard a single order shouted. There was not a single hint of flurry.

It is about seven hours now since we landed, and I feel as though we had been weeks away already—I suppose because there is so much to see. And yet it doesn't seem very foreign, really; and if only I could remember some of the French we were supposed to learn at school, so as to be able to understand what the people in the street are talking about, it would be just like a fresh bit of England. Although, just a few hours away, with no sea between us, there's the Hun, with his poison gas and his Black Marias and all the rest of the German outfit. Well, we've brought a good chunk of England here since the war began; solid acres of bully beef and barbed wire, condensed milk and galvanised iron, Maconochie rations, small-arm ammunition, biscuits, hand grenades, jam, picks and shovels, cheese, rifles, butter, boots, and pretty well everything else you can think of; all neatly stacked in miles of sheds, and ready for the different units on our Front.

I think the French are glad to see us. They have a kind of a welcoming way with them, in the streets and everywhere, that makes you feel as though, if you're not actually at home, you are on a visit to your nearest relations. A jolly, cheery, kindly good-natured lot they are, in spite of all the fighting in their own country and all the savage destruction the Huns have brought. The people in the town are quite keen on our drums and bugles; marching past them is like a review. It makes you "throw a chest" no matter what your pack weighs; and we are all carrying truck enough to stock a canteen with. The kiddies run along and catch you by the hand. The girls—there are some wonderfully pretty girls here, who have a kind of a way with them, a sort of style that is French, I suppose; it's pretty taking, anyhow—they wave their handkerchiefs and smile. "Bon chance!" they tell you. And you feel they really mean "Good luck!" I like these people, and they seem to like us pretty well. As for men, you don't see many of them about. They are in the fighting line, except the quite old ones. And the way the women carry on their work is something fine. All with such a jolly swing and a laugh; something brave and taking and fine about them all.

If this writing seems a bit ragged you must excuse it. The point of my indelible pencil seems to wear down uncommonly fast; I suppose because of the rough biscuit box that is my table. We are in a tent, with a rather muddy boarded floor, and though the wind blows mighty cold and keen outside, we are warm as toast in here. I fancy we shall be here till to-morrow night. Probably do a route march round the town and show ourselves off to-morrow. The C. O. rather fancies himself in the matter of our band and the Battalion's form in marching. We're not bad, you know; and "A" Company, of course, is pretty nearly the last word. "Won't be much sleep for the Kaiser after 'A' Company gets to the Front," says "the Peacemaker." We call our noble company commander "the Peacemaker," or sometimes "Ramsay Angell," as I think I must have told you before, because he's so deadly keen on knuckle-duster daggers and things of that sort. "Three inches over the right kidney, and when you hear his quiet cough you can pass on to the next Boche," says "the Peacemaker," when he is showing off a new trench dagger. Sort of, "And the next article, please," manner he has, you know; and we all like him for it. It's his spirit that's made "A" Company what it is. I don't mean that we call him "the Peacemaker" to his face, you know.

We can't be altogether war-worn veterans or old campaigners yet, I suppose, though it does seem much more than seven hours since we landed. But everyone agrees there's something about us that we did not have last year—I mean yesterday. From the Colonel down to the last man in from the depot we've all got it; and though I don't know what it is, it makes a lot of difference. I think it is partly that there isn't any more "Out there" with us now. It's "Out here." And everything that came before to-day is "Over in England," you know; ever so far away. I don't know why a man should feel more free here than in England. But there it is. The real thing, the thing we've all been longing for, the thing we joined for, seems very close at hand now, and, naturally, you know, everyone wants to do his bit. It's funny to hear our fellows talking, as though the Huns were round the corner. If there's anything a man doesn't like—a sore heel, or a split canteen of stew, or a button torn off—"We'll smarten the Boche for that," they say, or, "Righto! That's another one in for the Kaiser!"

You would have thought we should have had time during the past six months or so to have put together most of the little things a campaigner wants, wouldn't you? especially seeing that a man has to carry all his belongings about with him and yet I would make a sporting bet that there are not half a dozen men in the Battalion who have bought nothing to carry with them to-day. There is a Y. M. C. A. hut and a good canteen in this camp, and there has been a great business done in electric torches, tooth-powder, chocolate, knives, pipe-lighters, and all manner of notions. We are all very glad to be here, very glad; and nine out of ten will dream to-night of trenches in France and the Push we all mean to win V.C.'s in. But that's not to say we shall forget England and the—the little things we care about at home. Now I'm going to turn in for my first sleep in France. So give what you have to spare of my love to all whom it may concern, and accept the rest yourself from your

"Temporary Gentleman."

THE FIRST MARCH

We reached this long, straggling village in pale starlight a little after six this morning; and with it the welcome end of the first stage of our journey from the port of disembarking to our section of the French Front.

In all the months of our training in England I never remember to have seen "A" Company anything like so tired; and we had some pretty gruelling times, too, during those four-day divisional stunts and in the chalk trenches on the Plain; and again in the night ops. on the heather of those North Yorkshire moors. But "A" Company was never so tired as when we found our billets here this morning. Yet we were in better form than any other company in the Battalion; and I'm quite sure no other Battalion in the Brigade could march against our fellows.

The whole thing is a question of what one has to carry. Just now, of course, we are carrying every blessed thing we possess, including great-coats and blankets, not to mention stocks of 'baccy, torches, maps, stationery, biscuits, and goodness knows what besides; far fuller kits, no doubt, than tried campaigners ever have. (I found little M——, of No. 3 Platoon, surreptitiously stuffing through a hedge a case of patent medicines, including cough-mixture and Mother Somebody's Syrup!) If you ever visit France you probably won't travel on your own ten toes; but if you should, be advised by me and cut your kit down to the barest minimum; and when you've done that, throw away a good half of what's left.

Boots and socks. Some people will tell you that stocks and shares and international politics are matters of importance. I used to think the pattern of my neckties made a difference to our auctions. I know now that the really big things, the things that are really important, are socks and boots, and hot coffee and sleep, and bread—"Pang—Compree?" says Tommy to the French women, with a finger at his mouth—and then socks and boots again. You thought we paid a good deal in the shop for those swanky trench boots, W—— and myself. That was nothing to what we've paid since for wearing 'em. Excellent trench boots, I dare say; but one has to walk across a good bit of France before getting to the trenches, you know. Those boots are much too heavy to carry and no good for marching. They look jolly and workmanlike, you know, but they eat up too much of one's heels. Tell all the officers you know to come out in ordinary marching boots, good ones, but ordinary ankle boots. Plenty time to get trench boots when they get to the trenches. Good old Q.M. Dept. will see to that. Our respected O.C. Company had no horse, you know (we haven't yet made connection with our transport), and his heels to-day look like something in the steak line about half-grilled.

We left camp at the port I mustn't name about eight o'clock last night, and marched down the hill to the station in sort of thoughtful good spirits, the packs settling down into their grooves. To save adding its immensity to my pack, I wore my imposing trench coat, with its sheep-skin lining; waist measurement over all, say a hundred and twenty-five. Two of us had some difficulty about ramming "the Peacemaker," through his carriage door into the train, he also being splendid in a multi-lined trench coat. Then we mostly mopped up perspiration and went to sleep.

Between twelve and one o'clock in the morning we left the train (not without emotion; it was a friendly, comfortable train), and started to march across France. The authorities, in their godlike way, omitted to give us any information as to how far we were to march. But the weather was fine, and "A" Company moved off with a good swing, to the tune of their beloved "Keep the Camp Fires Burning." The biggest of packs seems a trifle, you know, immediately after four hours' rest in a train. But after the first hour it's astonishing how its importance in your scheme of things grows upon you; and at the end of the third or fourth hour you are very glad to stuff anything like bottles of Mother Somebody's Syrup through a gap in the nearest hedge.

It was at about that stage that word reached us of one or two men falling out from the rear companies. At this "the Peacemaker" began jogging up and down the left of our Company—we march on the right of the road in France—and, for all his sore heels and tremendous coat, showing the skittishness of a two-year-old. And he's even good years older than any of the rest of us, or than anyone else in the Company. I chipped my fellows into starting up another song, and my Platoon Sergeant cheerfully passed the word round that if anybody in No. 1 dared to fall out he'd disembowel him with a tin-opener.

As an actual fact not a single "A" Company man did fall out, though in the last lap I was a bit nervy about old Tommy Dodd in 3 Section, whose rifle I carried, and one or two others. At the end "the Peacemaker" was carrying the rifles of two men, and everybody was thankful for walls to lean against when we stood easy in this village. My chaps were splendid.

"Stick it, Tommy Dodd!" I said to the old boy once, near the end. His good old face was all twisted with the pain of his feet and the mass of extra kit which no doubt his wife had made him carry.

"Stick it!" says he, with his twisted grin. "Why, I'm just beginning to enjoy it, sir. Just getting into me stride, I am. I wouldn't 've missed this for all the beer in England, sir. But you wait till we get alongside them blighted Boches, sir, an' see if I don't smarten some of 'em for this. I'll give 'em sore 'eels!"

It was only by lying to the extent of at least ten years that the old thing was able to enlist, and you couldn't get him to "go sick" if you drove him with a whip. The only way old Tommy Dodd's spirit could be broken would be if you sent him to the depot and refused him his chance of "smartening them blighted Boches."

Everyone in the village was asleep when we got there, but on the door we found chalked up (as it might be "Lot So-and-so" at a sale) "1 Officer, 25 men, 'A' Coy.," and so on. We officers shed our packs and coats in the road—the joy of that shedding!—and went round with our platoons picking out their quarters, and shepherding them in before they could fall asleep. We knocked up the inhabitants, who came clattering out in clogs, with candle-ends in big lanterns. Most remarkably cheery and good-natured they all seemed, for that time of day; mostly women, you know, you don't find many home-staying men in France to-day. The most of the men's billets are barns and granaries, and there is a good supply of straw. I can tell you there was no need to sound any "Lights Out" or "Last Post." No. 1 Platoon just got down into their straw like one man, and no buck at all about it.

Then when we had seen them all fixed up, we foraged round for our own billets. Mine proved a little brick-floored apartment, in which you might just swing a very small cat if you felt like that kind of jugglery, opening out of the main room, or bar, of an estaminet—the French village version of our inn, you know. Here, when they had had their sleep, the men began to flock this afternoon for refreshment. The drinking is quite innocent, mostly café au lait, and occasionally cider. The sale of spirits is (very wisely) entirely prohibited. It's most amusing to hear our chaps "slinging the bat." They are still at the stage of thinking that if they shout loudly enough they must be understood, and it is rather as a sort of good-humoured concession to the eccentricities of our French hosts, than with any idea of tackling another language, that they throw in their "Bon jor's" and the like.

"Got any pang, Mum?" they ask cheerfully. Another repeats it, in a regular open-air auction shout, with a grin and an interrogative "Compree?" at the end of each remark. Some, still at the top of their voices, are even bold enough to try instructing the French. "Françaisee, 'pang'—see? In Engletairy, 'bread'—see? Compree? B-R-E-A-D, bread." And the kindly French women, with their smiling lips and anxious, war-worn eyes, they nod and acquiesce, and bustle in and out with yard-long loaves and bowls of coffee of precisely the same size as the diminutive wash-hand basin in my room. I tell you one's heart warms to these French women, in their workmanlike short frocks (nearly all black), thick, home-knitted stockings, and wooden clogs. How they keep the heels of their stockings so dry and clean, I can't think. The subject, you notice, is one of peculiar interest to all of us just now—sock heels, I mean.

There have been a good many jobs for officers all day, so far, and only an hour or so for rest. But we have arranged for a sumptuous repast—roast duck and sausages and treacle pudding—at six o'clock, and the C.O. and Providence permitting, we shall all turn in before eight. We don't expect to move on from here till early the day after to-morrow, and shall have our transport with us by then. I gather we shall march all the way from here to the trenches; and really, you know, it's an excellent education for all of us in the conditions of the country. People at home don't realise what a big thing the domestic side of soldiering is. Our C.O. knew, of course, because he is an old campaigner. That's why, back there in England, he harried his officers as he did. We have to know all there is to know about the feet, boots, socks, food, cleanliness, and health of each one of our men, and it has been made part of our religion that an officer must never, never, never eat, sleep, or rest until he has personally seen to it that each man in his command is provided for in these respects. He has made it second nature to us, and since we reached France one has learned the wisdom of his teaching. I must clear out now—a pow-wow at Battalion Orderly Room: the village Ecole des Filles. The weather has completely changed. There's a thin, crisp coating of snow over everything, and it's clear and dry and cold. We're all rather tired, but fit as fleas, and awfully thankful to be getting so near the firing line. So make your mind quite easy about your

"Temporary Gentleman."

THE TALE OF A TUB

If inclined to revile me for apparent neglect of you these last few days, be charitable and revile lightly.

It's astonishing how full one's days are. And then when late evening arrives and arrangements for next morning are complete, and one's been the round of one's platoon billets and seen all in order for the night—then, instead of being free to write one's own letters, one must needs wade through scores written by the men of one's platoon, who—lucky beggars!—have three times the leisure we can ever get. Their letters must all be censored and initialed, you see. Rightly enough, I suppose, the military principle seems to be never to allow the private soldier to be burdened by any responsibility which an officer can possibly take. The giving away of military information in a letter, whether inadvertently or knowingly, is, of course, a serious offence. (German spies are everywhere.) When I have endorsed all my platoon's letters, the responsibility for their contents rests on my shoulders and the men run no risks.

If I were an imitative bird now, you would find my letter reading something after this style:

"Just a few lines to let you know how we are getting on, hoping this finds you in the pink as it leaves me at present. We are getting very near the Germans now, and you can take it from me they'll get what for when we come up with 'em. The grub here is champion, but we are always ready for more, and I shan't be sorry to get that parcel you told me of. Please put in a few fags next time. The French people have a queer way of talking so you can't always understand all they say, but they're all right, I can tell you, when you get to know 'em, and I can sling their bat like one o'clock now. It's quite easy once you get the hang of it, this bong jor and pang parley voo. Milk is lay, and not too easy to get. The boys are all in the pink, and hoping you're the same, so no more at present," etc.

One sometimes gets mad with them for trifles, but for all the things that really matter—God bless 'em all! By Jove! they are Britons. They're always "in the pink" and most things are "champion," and when the ration-wagon's late and a man drops half his whack in the mud, he grins and says, "The Army of to-day's all right"; and that, wait till he gets into the trenches, he'll smarten the Boches up for that! Oh, but they are splendid; and though one gets into the way of thinking and saying one's own men are the best in the Army, yet, when one means business one knows very well the whole of the New Army's made of the same fine stuff. Why, in my platoon, and in our Company for that matter, they are every mother's son of them what people at home call rough, ignorant fellows. And I admit it. Rough they certainly are; and ignorant, too, by school standards. But, by Jingo! their hearts are in the right place, and I'd back any one of them against any two goose-stepping Boches in the Kaiser's Prussian Guard.

And, with it all, mind you, they're so English. I mean they are kind, right through to their bones; good fellows, you know; sportsmen, every one of 'em; fellows you'd trust to look after your mother. They're as keen as mustard to get to the strafing of Boches; but that's because the Boche is the enemy, war is war, and duty is duty. You couldn't make haters of 'em, not if you paid 'em all ambassadorial salaries to cultivate a scowl and sing hymns of hate. Not them. Not all the powers of Germany and Austria could make baby-killers, women-slayers, and church-destroyers of these chaps of ours. If I know anything about it, they are fine soldiers, but the Kaiser himself—"Kayser," they call him—couldn't make brutes and bullies of 'em. Warm their blood—and, mind you, you can do it easily enough, even with a football in a muddy field, when they've been on carrying fatigues all day—and, by Jove! there's plenty of devil in 'em. God help the men in front of 'em when they've bayonets fixed! But withal they're English sportsmen all the time, and a French child can empty their pockets and their haversacks by the shedding of a few tears.

But I run on (and my candle runs down) and I give you no news. This is our last night here, and I ought to be asleep in my flea-bag, for we make an early start to-morrow for our first go in the trenches. But it's jolly yarning here to you, while the whole village is asleep, and no chits are coming in, and the Battalion Orderly Room over the way is black and silent as the grave, except for the sentry's footsteps in the mud. I'm in rather good quarters here, in the Mayor's house. When we left that first village—I'm afraid I haven't written since—we had three days of marching, sleeping in different billets each night. Here in this place, twelve miles from the firing line, we've had five days; practising with live bombs, getting issues of trench kit, and generally making last preparations. To-morrow night we sleep in tents close to the line and begin going into trenches for instruction.

But, look here, before I turn in, I must just tell you about this household and my hot bath last night. The town is a queer little place; farming centre, you know. The farm-houses are all inside the village, and mine—M. le Maire's—is one of the best. From the street you see huge great double doors, that a laden wagon can drive through, in a white wall. That is the granary wall. You enter by the big archway into a big open yard, the centre part of which is a wide-spreading dung-hill and reservoir. All round the yard are sheds and stables enclosing it, and facing you at the back the low, long white house, with steps leading up to the front door, which opens into the kitchen. This is also the living-room of M. le Maire and his aged mother. Their family lived here before the Revolution, and the three sturdy young women and one old, old man employed on the farm, all live in the house.

M. le Maire is a warm man, reputed to have a thorough mastery of the English tongue, among other things, as a result of "college" education. So I gather from the really delightful old mother, who, though bent nearly double, appears to run the whole show, including the Town Hall opposite our Battalion Headquarters. I have never succeeded in inducing the Mayor to speak a word of English, but he has a little dictionary like a prayer-book, with perfectly blinding print, and somehow carries on long and apparently enjoyable conversations with my batman (who certainly has no French), though, as I say, one never heard a word of English on his lips.

I know what the newspapers are. They pretend to give you the war news. But I'll bet they'll tell you nothing of yesterday's really great event, when the Commander of No. 1 Platoon took a hot bath, as it were under municipal auspices, attended by two Company Headquarters orderlies, his own batman, and the cordially expressed felicitations of his brother officers, not to mention the mayoral household, and the whole of No. 1 Platoon, which is billeted in the Mayor's barns and outbuildings. Early in the day the best wash-tub had been commandeered for this interesting ceremony, and I fancy it has an even longer history behind it than the Mayor's pre-Revolution home. It is not definitely known that Marie Antoinette used this tub, bathing being an infrequent luxury in her day; but if she had been cursed with our modern craze for washing, and chanced to spend more than a year or so in this mud-set village of M——, she certainly would have used this venerable vessel, which, I gather, began life as the half of a cider barrel, and still does duty of that sort on occasion, and as a receptacle for the storing of potatoes and other nutritious roots, when not required for the more intimate service of M. le Maire's mother, for the washing of M. le Maire's corduroys and underwear, or by M. le Maire himself, at the season of Michaelmas, I believe, in connection with the solemn rite of his own annual bath, which festival was omitted this year out of deference to popular opinion, because of the war.

The household of the Mayor, headed by this respected functionary himself, received me at the portals of his ancestral home and ushered me most kindly and graciously, if with a dash of grave, half-pitying commiseration, to what I thought at first was the family vault, though, as I presently discovered, it was in reality the mayoral salon or best parlour—as seen in war time—draped in sacking and year-old cobwebs. Here, after some rather embarrassing conversation, chiefly gesticulatory on my side—my conversational long suit is "Pas du tout! Merci beaucoup," and "Mais oui, Madame," with an occasional "Parfaitement," stirred in now and again, not with any meaning, but as a kind of guarantee of good faith, because I think it sounds amiable, if not indeed like my lambs in their billets, "Bien gentil," and "Très convenable, Monsieur." It is thus they are invariably described to me when I go inspecting. As I was saying, here I was presently left alone with the household cat, two sick rabbits in a sort of cage which must once have housed a cockatoo or parrot, my own little towel (a torn half, you know, designed to reduce valise weight), my sponge (but, alack! not my dear old worn-out nail-brush, now lying in trenches on Salisbury Plain), and the prehistoric wash-tub, now one quarter filled by what the Mayor regarded, I gathered, as perhaps the largest quantity of hot water ever accumulated in one place—two kettles and one oil-can full, carried by the orderlies.

The cat and the rabbits watched my subsequent proceedings with the absorbed interest of an intelligent mid-Victorian infant at its first pantomime. The cat, I blush to say, was female, and old enough to know better, but I trust the rabbits were of my own sex. Anyhow, they were sick, so perhaps it doesn't matter. The entire mayoral household, with my batman and others, were assembled in the big kitchen, separated from the chamber of my ablutions only by a door having no kind of fastening and but one hinge. Their silence was broken only by an occasional profound sigh from the Mayor's aged mother, and three sounds of reflective expectoration at considerable intervals from the Mayor himself. So I judged my bathing to be an episode of rare and anxious interest to the mayoral family.

My feet I anointed copiously with a disgusting unguent of great virtue—it's invaluable for lighting braziers when one's only fuel is muddy coke and damp chits—called anti-frostbite grease, that is said to guard us from the disease known as "Trench Feet," rumoured prevalent in our sector by reason of the mellow quality and depth of its mud, which, whilst apparently almost liquid, yet possesses enough body and bouquet—remember how you used to laugh at our auction catalogue superlatives in cellar lots?—to rob a man of his boots at times. For my hands—chipped about a bit now—I used carbolated vaseline. (Do you remember the preternaturally slow and wall-eyed salesman, with the wart, in the Salisbury shop where we bought it?) And then, clothed most sumptuously in virginal underwear, I crawled into my flea-bag, there to revel from 10.40 P.M. to 6 A.M., as I am about to do now, less one hour in the morning. How I wish one could consciously enjoy the luxury of sleep while sleeping! Good night and God bless you! God bless all the sweet, brave waiting women of England, and France, and Russia; and I wish I could send a bit of my clean comfort to-night to as many as may be of our good chaps, and France's bon camarades, out here.

When next I write we shall have seen a bit of the trenches, I hope, and so then you should have something more like real news from your

"Temporary Gentleman."

THE TRENCHES AT LAST

You must forgive my not having sent anything but those two Field Service post cards for a whole week, but, as our Canadian subaltern, Fosset, says, it really has been "some" week. My notion was to write you fully my very first impression of the trenches, but the chance didn't offer, and perhaps it's as well. It couldn't be fresher in my mind than it is now, and yet I understand it more, and see the thing more intelligently than on the first night.

We are now back in the village of B——, three miles from our trenches. We are here for three days' alleged rest, and then, as a Battalion, take over our own Battalion sub-sector of trenches. So far, we have only had forty-eight hours in, as a Battalion; though, as individuals, we have had more. When we go in again it will be as a Battalion, under our own Brigade and Divisional arrangements, to hold our own Brigade front, and be relieved later by the other two Battalions of our Brigade.

"A" Company is, I am sorry to say, in tents for these three days out; tents painted to look like mud and grass (for the benefit of the Boche airmen) and not noticeably more comfortable than mud and grass. An old fellow having the extraordinary name of Bonaparte Pinchgare, has been kind enough to lend us his kitchen and scullery for officers' mess and quarters; and we, like the men, are contriving to have a pretty good time, in despite of chill rain and all-pervading mud. We are all more or less caked in mud, but we have seen Huns, fired at 'em, been fired at by them, spent hours in glaring through rag and tin-decked barbed wire at their trenches, and generally feel that we have been blooded to trench warfare. We have only lost two men, and they will prove to be only slightly wounded, I think; one, before he had ever set foot in a trench—little Hinkson of my No. 2 section—and the other, Martin, of No. 3 Platoon, only a few hours before we came out.

Hinkson was pipped by a chance bullet in the calf of the leg, as we passed through a wood, behind the support trench. Very likely a Boche loosed that bullet off in mere idleness, a couple of thousand yards away; and I doubt if it will mean even a Blighty for Hinkson. He may be put right in the Field Ambulance or Clearing Station near here, or, at farthest, down at the Base. Or he may chance to go across to Blighty—the first casualty in the Battalion. The little chap was furiously angry over getting knocked out before he could spot a Hun through the foresight of his rifle, but his mate, Kennedy, has sworn to lay out a couple of Boches for Hinkson, before he gets back to us, and Kennedy will do it.

First impressions! Do you know, I think my first impression was of the difficulty of finding one's way about in a maze of muddy ditches which all looked exactly alike, despite a few occasional muddy notice-boards perched in odd corners: "Princes Street," "Sauchiehall Street," "Manchester Avenue," "Stinking Sap," "Carlisle Road," and the like. I had a trench map of the sector, but it seemed to me one never could possibly identify the different ways, all mud being alike, and no trench offering anything but mud to remember it by. In the front or fire-trench itself, the firing line, one can hop up on the fire-step, look round quickly between bullets, and get a bearing. But in all these interminable communication and branch trenches where one goes to and fro, at a depth varying from six to ten or twelve feet, seeing only clay and sky, how the dickens could one find the way?

And yet, do you know, so quickly are things borne in upon you in this crude, savage life of raw realities, so narrow is your world, so vital your need of knowing it; so unavoidable is your continuous alertness, and so circumscribed the field of your occupation, that I feel now I know nothing else in the world quite so well and intimately as I know that warren of stinking mud: the two sub-sectors in which I spent last week. Manchester Avenue, Carlisle Road, Princes Street, with all their side alleys and boggy by-ways! Why, they are so photographed on the lining of my brain that, if I were an artist (instead of a very muddy subaltern ex-clerk) I could paint the whole thing for you—I wish I could. Not only do I know them, but I've merely to shut my eyes to see any and every yard of them; I can smell them now; I can feel the precise texture of their mud. I know their hidden holes and traps, where the water lies deep. I know to an inch where the bad breaks are in the duck-boards that you can't see because the yellow water covers them. Find one's way! I know them far better than I know the Thames Embankment, the Strand, or Brixton Hill! That's not an exaggeration.

Duck-boards, by the way, or duck-walks, are a kindly invention (of the R.E., I suspect) to save soldiers from the bottomless pit, and to enable officers on duty to cover rather more than a hundred yards an hour in getting along their line of trench. Take two six-or eight-feet lengths of two inches by four inches' scantling; nail two or three inch bits of batten across these with two or three inch gaps between, the width of the frame being, say, eighteen inches. Thus you have a grating six or eight feet long and narrow enough to lie easily in the bottom of a trench. If these gratings rest on trestles driven deep down into the mud, and your trenches are covered by them throughout—well, then you may thank God for all His mercies and proceed to the more interesting consideration of strafing Boches, and avoiding being strafed by them. If you haven't got these beneficent inventions of the R.E., and you are in trenches like ours, then you will devote most of your energies to strafing the R.E., or some other unseen power for good, through your own headquarters, for a supply of duck-walks, and you will (if you are wise) work night and day without check, in well and truly laying every single length you can acquire.

("Acquire" is a good, sound word. I would never blame a man for stealing duck-walks from any source whatsoever—providing, of course, he is not so far lost to all sense of decency as to steal 'em from "A" Company; and even then, if he could manage it, his cleverness would almost deserve forgiveness; and, equally, of course, that he's going to use 'em for their legitimate purpose, and not just to squat on in a dug-out; least of all for the absolutely criminal purpose of using as fuel.)

"What a fuss you make about mere things to walk on!" perhaps you'll say. "I thought the one thing really important was getting to grips with the enemy." Mmmf! Yes. Quite so. It is. But, madam, how to do it? "There be ways and means to consider, look you, whateffer," as Billy Morgan says. (Billy was the commander of No. 2 Platoon, you remember, and now, as reserve Machine-Gun officer, swanks insufferably about "the M.G. Section," shoves most of his Platoon work upon me, and will have a dug-out of his own. We rot him by pretending to attribute these things to the influence of his exalted compatriot, the Minister of Munitions. As a fact, they are due to his own jolly hard work, and really first-rate abilities.)

This trench warfare isn't by any means the simple business you might suppose, and neither, of course, is any other kind of warfare. There can be no question of just going for the enemy bald-headed. He wishes you would, of course; just as we wish to goodness he would. You have to understand that up there about the front line, the surrounding air and country can at any moment be converted into a zone of living fire—gas, projectiles, H.E. (High Explosive, you know) flame, bullets, bursting shrapnel. If you raise a finger out of trenches by daylight, you present Fritz with a target, which he will very promptly and gratefully take, and blow to smithereens. That's understood, isn't it? Right. To be able to fight, in any sort of old way at all, you must continue to live—you and your men. To continue to live you must have cover. Hence, nothing is more important than to make your trenches habitable, and feasible; admitting, that is, of fairly easy and quick communication.

To live, you see, you must eat and drink. The trenches contain no A B C's. Every crumb of bread, every drop of tea or water, like every cartridge you fire, must be carried up from the rear on men's shoulders, along many hundreds of yards of communicating trenches. Also, in case you are suddenly attacked, or have to attack, quick movement is vital. Nature apparently abhors a trench, which is a kind of a vacuum, and not precisely lovable, anyhow; and, in this part of the world, she proceeds wherever possible to fill it with water. Pumps? Why, certainly. But clay and slush sides cave in. Whizz-bangs and H.E. descend from on high displacing much porridge-like soil. Men hurrying to and fro day and night, disturb and mash up much earth in these ditches. And, no matter how or why, there is mud; mud unspeakable and past all computation. Consider it quietly for a moment, and you will feel as we do about duck-walks—I trust the inventor has been given a dukedom—and realise the pressing importance of various material details leading up to that all-important strafing of Boches.

But there, the notion of trying to tell you about trenches in one letter is, I find, hopelessly beyond me, and would only exhaust you, even if I could bring it off. I can only hope gradually to get some sort of a picture into your mind, so that you will have a background of sorts for such news of our doings as I'm able to send you as we go on. Just now, I am going to tackle an alarming stack of uncensored letters from Nos. 1 and 2 Platoons—some of the beggars appear to be extraordinarily polygamous in the number of girls they write to; bless 'em!—and then to turn in and sleep. My goodness, it's a fine thing, sleep, out of trenches! But I'll write again, probably to-morrow.

The men are all remarkably fit and jolly. One or two old hands here have told me the line we are taking over is really pretty bad. Certainly it was a revelation to our fellows, after the beautiful, clean tuppenny-tubes of trenches we constructed on Salisbury Plain. But one hears no grousing at all, except of the definitely humorous and rather pleased kind—rather bucked about it, you know—the men are simply hungry for a chance to "get" at the Hun, and they work like tigers at trench betterment. We are all well and jolly, and even if sometimes you don't hear often, there's not the slightest need to worry in any way about your

"Temporary Gentleman."

A DISSERTATION ON MUD

The second of our rest days is over, and to-morrow night we shall go into the firing line and relieve the ——s. We shall march back the way we came out, down the sad-looking green valley round the lips of which some of our batteries are hidden; through the deserted streets of ——, with its boarded-up shops and houses; on over the weed-grown railway track, through a little village whose church is still unbroken; though few of its cottage windows have any glass left in them; across the busy little river to Ambulance Corner—a favourite target for Boche shells, that bit of road—and so through the wooded hollow where the German gas lies deadly thick when it comes, into the foot of Manchester Avenue, the long communication trench leading up to the Battalion's trench headquarters in the support line, where "A" Company will branch off to the right, "B" to the left, and "C" to the extreme left of our sub-sector.

That town I mentioned—not the little village close to Ambulance Corner, where most roofs and walls show shell-torn rents and a few are smashed to dust—is rather like a city of the dead. It has a cathedral which the gentle Hun has ranged on with thoughtful frightfulness. But though, under the guidance of his aerial observers, the Boche has smashed up that cathedral pretty thoroughly, and its tower has great gaping chunks riven out of its sides by shells, yet, as folk say miraculously, its crowning attraction, a monstrous gilt figure of the Madonna and Child, thirty to fifty feet high, remains intact. But this remarkable gilt statue has been undermined at its base by H.E. shell, and now hangs over at right angles to the street far below it—a most extraordinary sight. The devout naturally claim that no German projectile will prove powerful enough to lower the sacred emblem any farther. Boche savagery in France has not weakened anyone's faith, I think; possibly the reverse.

A foundry or factory near by is now a tangled mass of scrap iron, and as one marches through the town one has queer intimate glimpses of deserted bedroom interiors, with homely furnishings exposed to all the weather, where a shell has sliced one wall clean down from a first or second storey and left the ground floor intact.

But I was going to tell you about trenches. When I first began to walk up Manchester Avenue, my thought was, "There's nothing much to grumble at here. I call this pretty good. A little sloppy under foot perhaps, but really nothing to write home about." I've often laughed at that since. For several hundred yards it cuts through a ridge of chalk. It is wide enough to enable one to pass a man in it anywhere with comfort. Its parapet and parados tower white, clean, and unbroken a foot or so over your head. Its sides are like the sides of a house or a tunnel; good, dry, solid chalk, like our Salisbury trenches, with never a sign of caving in about them. And on the hard bottom under foot-perhaps two or three inches of nice clean chalky slime and water. It has a gentle gradient which makes it self-draining.

You could easily go right up it to Battalion Headquarters in the support trench in ordinary marching boots, and be none the worse. And since then I've known what it means to get a bootful of muddy water, when wearing trench boots; rubber thigh-boots, you know, with straps buckling to your belt. The change begins a little way above the Battalion Headquarters dug-out, in support line. You leave the chalk behind you and get into clay, and then you leave the clay behind you and get into yellow porridge and treacle. And then you come to a nice restful stretch of a couple of hundred yards or so, in which you pray for more porridge; and it seems you're never coming to any more. This is a vein of glue in the section which "A" will go to-morrow night.

"Very old and curious!" "Remarkably fine, full body!" Oh! that glue vein is from the end bin, genuine old-vatted, I can assure you. It must have eaten up some hundreds of pairs of boots by now, and a regular Noah's Ark full of trench stores, ammunition, and other useful material.

The glue vein probably had a bottom in bygone days, but now I fancy the Hun has knocked the bottom out of it. In any case, we never met anyone who had found bottom in that bit of line, and as the tallest man in the company is only six foot two, I hope we never shall. At first you think you will skip along quick, like skating fast on very thin ice, and with feet planted far apart, so as to get the support of the trench sides. That bit of trench is possessed of devils, and they laugh when you stretch your legs, meaning to get through with it as quick as you can. The glue's so thick and strong, after the soupy stuff you've been wading through, that you welcome the solid look of it. (That's where the devils begin their chuckling.)

Perhaps at the first few steps you only sink about a foot, leaving your knees easily clear. "Oh! come!" you say (and that's where the devils of the glue patch laugh out loud). At the next step you go in a little deeper, and in your innocence give quite a sharp tug to lift your foot. You lift it all right, perhaps half-way up the leg of your boot, possibly ripping off a brace button in the process, if you've been unwise enough to fasten up the top straps of your boots that way. (The devils go on laughing.) Then you pause, reflectively, while shoving your foot down in your boot again, and take a good look round you, wondering what sort of a place you've struck. (This is where the devils have to hold their sides in almost painful hilarity.)

While you reflect you sink, so slowly and softly that you don't notice it till you try the next step. And then, with the devils of that section roaring their ugly Hunnish heads off all round you, if you have no better luck than Tommy Dodd had, his first night in, you may continue reflecting for quite a long while, till somebody comes along who knows that particular health resort. Then two or three Samaritans with picks and shovels and a post or two will be brought, and, very laboriously, you'll be dug and levered out; possibly with your boots, possibly without either them or your socks.

But what reduces the devils to helpless, tearful contortions of merriment, is a coincidental decision on the part of a Boche gunner to start peppering that bit of trench with shrap., or a machine-gun, during your reflective period. Then it's great; a really first-class opportunity for reviewing the errors of your past life.

After this substantial pièce de résistance (yes, thanks, I'm progressing very nicely with my French this term), you come to a delicately refreshing dessert in Sauchiehall Street, where the water lies very deep in most parts, but so sweetly liquid as to wash the glue well off up to our coat pockets. This innocent stuff can be pumped out quite easily, and is pumped out every day, into a gully, which we devoutly hope leads well into a Boche sap. But pump as you will, it fills up very rapidly. And so, with new washed boots (and coat pockets) to Whizz-bang Corner, where Sauchiehall Street enters the fire trench, and the Hun loves to direct his morning and evening hymns of hate in the hope of catching tired ration-carriers, and, no doubt, of spilling their rations. It was there that Martin of No. 3 Platoon got his quietener on the morning we came out. But with luck and no septic trouble, hell be back in a month or so. The surroundings are a bit toxic, as you may imagine. That's why, after even the slightest wound, they inoculate with anti-tetanus—marvellously successful stuff.

The fire trench in this particular bit is rather a mockery, as "the Peacemaker" said, when he tried to climb out of it, our first night in, to have a look at the barbed wire and No Man's Land. He had a revolver in one hand and a bomb in the other, but I am pleased to say the safety-pin of that bomb was efficient; and, in any case, I relieved him of it after he fell back the second time. The sides of that trench have been so unmercifully pounded by the Boche, and the rain has been so persistent of late that the porridge here is more like gruel than the breakfast dish, and the average sand-bag in the parapet, when not submerged, is as unfriendly to get a grip on, as one of those crustaceous pink bombs they sometimes swindle you with at restaurants. You know, the kind you chase round your plate and find splinter-proof.

Thirty or forty yards north from Whizz-bang Corner, in the fire trench, you come to a loop turn to the rear called Whitehall, not because there's a War Office there, but because there's a queer little vein of chalk which disappointingly peters out again in less than a dozen paces. That leads to the Company Headquarters dug-out; an extraordinary hole, I thought, when I first saw it; a jolly nice, homely dug-out I think it now, and with a roof—well, not shell-proof, you know, but water-tight, and quite capable of standing a whizz or a grenade, or anything short of serious H.E. You stride over a good little dam and then down two steps to get into it, and it has a real door, carried up, I suppose, from the village in the rear. It also has a gilt-edged looking-glass, a good packing-case table, the remains of two wooden chairs, two shelves made of rum-jar cases, and two good solid wire-strung bunks, one over the other. There's no doubt it is some dug-out.

And, madam, don't you go for to think that there's anything contemptible about our trenches, anyhow. Perhaps I pitched it a bit strong about that glue patch. In any case, I promise you two things: (1) They'll be very different trenches before long if "A" Company has two or three turns of duty in them. (2) They're every bit as good as, and a bit better than, the trenches opposite, where the Hun is; and I know it because I've been there. I meant to have told you of that to-night, but I've left it too late, and must wait for my next letter. But it's quite right. I've had a look at their front line and found it distinctly worse than ours, and got back without a scratch, to sign myself still your

"Temporary Gentleman."

TAKING OVER ON A QUIET NIGHT

Last evening brought an end to our rest cure, as I told you it would, and saw us taking over out section of the firing line. Now I have just turned into the Company dug-out for a rest, having been pretty much on the hop all night except for a short spell between two and four this morning. As I think I told you, this is not at all a bad dug-out, and quite weather-proof. It has two decent bunks one over the other. We all use it as a mess, and "the Peacemaker," Taffy Morgan, and myself use it for sleeping in; Tony and "the Infant" kipping down (when they get the chance) in a little tiny dug-out that we made ourselves when we were in here for instruction, just the other side of Whizz-bang Corner, in the fire trench.

You remember "the Infant," don't you? No. 4 Platoon. His father's doctoring now in the R.A.M.C. He's a nice boy, and has come on a lot since we got out here. He was to have been a land surveyor, or something of that sort, and has a first-rate notion of trench work and anything like building.

In writing to you I'd like to avoid, if I could, what seems to be a pretty common error among men at the front, and one that leads to some absurd misapprehensions among people at home. I remember listening once in a tram-car at home to two Tommies, one of whom had returned from the front. The other was asking him how they managed in the matter of shifting wounded men back to some place where they could be attended to.

"Oh! that's simple enough," said the chap who'd been out. "They've a regular routine for that. You see, there are always barges waiting, and when you're wounded they just dump you on board a barge and take you down the canal to where the dressing station is."

"I see; so that's the way it's done," said the other man.

And I could see that the impression left on his mind was that barges were in waiting on a canal right along the five hundred miles of Franco-British line.

You see what I mean. A fellow out here knows only his own tiny bit of front, and he's very apt to speak of it as if it were the Front, and folk at home are apt to think that whatever is applicable to their man's particular mile or so is applicable to the whole Front. Which, of course, is wildly wrong and misleading. When in trenches one battalion may find itself in a wood, another on a naked hillside, one in the midst of a ruined village, with the cellars of smashed cottages for dug-outs, and another with its trenches running alongside a river or canal. So don't make the mistake of thinking that what I tell you applies to the Front generally, although in a great many matters it may be typical enough.

Now you'd like to know about the business of taking over these trenches. Well, this was the way of it. "The Peacemaker," our noble Company Commander, came on here in advance yesterday afternoon, with the Company Sergeant-Major. Our Company S.M., by the way, is a remarkably fine institution, and, I think, the only real ex-regular we have in the Company. He's an ex-N.C.O. of Marines, and a really splendid fellow, who is out now for a V.C., and we all hope he'll get it. He and "the Peacemaker" came along about three hours ahead of us, leaving me to bring the Company. "The Peacemaker" went carefully all over this line with the O.C. of the Company we relieved, noted the sentry posts and special danger spots—unhealthy places, you know, more exposed to Boche fire than others—and generally took stock and made his plans for us.

I forgot to say that a Sergeant from each platoon accompanied "the Peacemaker" and the S.M., so as to be able to guide their respective platoons in to their own bits of the line when they arrived. Then the S.M. checked over all the trench stores—picks, shovels, wire, pumps, small-arm ammunition, rockets, mud-scoops, trench repair material, and all that—with the list held by the S.M. of the Company we were relieving, which our own beloved "Peacemaker," had to sign "certified correct," you know. Meantime, "the Peacemaker" took over from the other O.C. Company a report of work done and to be done—repairing parapets, laying duck-walks, etc.—though in this case I regret to remark the only very noticeable thing was the work to be done, or so it seems to us—and generally posted himself up and got all the tips he could.

Just about dusk "A" Company led the way out of B——, and marched the way I told you of to Ambulance Corner. Needless to say, they presented a fine soldierly appearance, led and commanded as they were for the time by your "Temporary Gentleman." There was a certain liveliness about Ambulance Corner when we reached it, as there so frequently is, and I am sorry to say poor "B" Company in our rear had two men wounded, one fatally. I took "A" Company at the double, in single file, with a yard or so between men, across the specially exposed bit at the corner, and was thankful to see the last of 'em bolt into the cover of Manchester Avenue without a casualty. It gave me some notion of the extra anxiety that weighs on the minds of O.C. Companies who take their responsibilities seriously, as I think most of 'em do.

Then, when we were getting near Whizz-bang Corner, we were met by the four platoon N.C.O.'s who had gone on in advance with the Coy. S.M., and they guided the platoons to their respective sections of our line. Meantime, you understand, not a man of the Company we were relieving had left the line. The first step was for us to get our platoon Sergeants to post sentries to relieve each one of those of the other Company, on the fire-step, and we ourselves were on hand with each group, to see that the reliefs thoroughly understood the information and instructions they got from the men they relieved. Then our advance N.C.O.'s showed the other men of their platoons such dug-outs as were available for them—a pretty thin lot in this section, but we shall tackle the job of increasing and improving 'em as soon as we can, while we Platoon Commanders had a buck with the Platoon Commanders of the other Company.

Finally, "the Peacemaker" shook hands with the O.C. of the Company we relieved outside Company Headquarters—that's this dug-out—the other fellow wished him luck, both of them, separately, telephoned down to Battalion Headquarters (in the support trenches) reporting the completion of the relief, and the last of the other Company filed away out down Sauchiehall Street to Manchester Avenue, billets and "alleged rest." As a matter of fact, they are to get some real rest, I believe, another Company of our Brigade being billeted in the village just behind the lines this week, to do all the carrying fatigues at night—bringing up trench-repair material and all that.

It was a quiet night, with no particular strafing, and that's all to the good, because, in the first place, it gives us a better chance to study the line again by daylight, and, again, it enables us to get on quickly with certain very necessary trench repairs. We had half the Company working all night at the parapet, which had some very bad gaps, representing a serious multiplication of unhealthy spots, which have to be passed many times day and night, and must always be dangerous to pass. The Boche is pretty nippy in locating gaps of this sort and getting his snipers and machine-gunners to range on them, so that unless they are repaired casualties are certain. One repairs them by building up the gaps with sand-bags, and for these it is necessary to find approximately dry earth: a pretty difficult job in this section.

No strafing and a quiet night! I wonder how you, and people generally at home, interpret that? "The rest of the Front was quiet"; "Nothing of interest to report"; "Tactical situation unchanged," and so on. They are the most familiar report phrases, of course.

Well, there was a time last night, or, rather, between two and four this morning, when on our particular section there was no firing at all beyond the dropping rifle fire of the Boche sentries opposite and a similar desultory fire from our sentries. Now and again a bullet so fired may get a man passing along a communication trench, or, more likely, of course, a man exposed, either on patrol in No Man's Land or in working on the parapet. More often they hit nobody. During the same time, in our particular section, a flare-light went up from the Boche line opposite, I suppose about every other minute. That's to give their sentries a chance of seeing any patrol we may have creeping about in their direction.

During all the rest of this quiet night of no strafing there was just "normal fire." That is to say, the Boche machine-guns sprayed our parapet and the intervening bit of No Man's Land, maybe, once every quarter of an hour. Their rifle fire was more continuous; their flares and parachute and star-lights the same. Eight or ten times in the night they gave us salvoes of a dozen whizz-bangs. Twice—once at about ten, and again about twelve—they gave our right a bit of a pounding with H.E., and damaged the parapet a little. Once they lobbed four rifle grenades over our left from a sap they have on that side. But we had been warned about that, and gave 'em gyp for it. We had a machine-gun trained on that sap-head of theirs, and plastered it pretty effectually, so quickly that I think we must have got their grenadiers. They shut up very promptly, anyhow, and a bombing patrol of ours that got to the edge of their sap half an hour later found not a creature there to bomb.

Our fire during the night was similar to theirs, but a bit less. "The Peacemaker" has a strong prejudice in favour of saving his ammunition for use on real live targets, and I think he's right. We had one man slightly wounded, and that's all. And I think that must be admitted to be pretty good, seeing that we were at work along the parapet all night. That is a specimen of a really quiet night.

At Stand-to this morning Fritz plastered our parapet very thoroughly with his machine-guns, evidently thinking we were Johnny Raws. He wasted hundreds of rounds of ammunition over this. We were all prepared. Not a head showed, and my best sniper, Corporal May, got one of their machine-gun observers neatly through the head. Our lines are only a hundred yards apart just there.

But I must turn in, old thing, or I'll get no rest to-day. I know I haven't told you about the look I had at the Boche trenches. But perhaps I'll have something better to tell when I next write.

Meantime, we are as jolly as sand-boys, and please remember that you need not be in the least anxious about your

"Temporary Gentleman."

"WHAT IT'S LIKE"

The wonder is, not that I didn't get the one post card you mention, but that you apparently have had everything I have written. Really, I do think the British postal arrangements out here are one of the most remarkable features of the war. The organisation behind our lines is quite extraordinary. Right up here in the firing line itself we get our letters and parcels every day. In the midst of a considerable bombardment I have seen fellows in artillery shelters in the line reading letters and opening parcels of little luxuries just received from home.

It's very nice of you to copy out my letters for friends at home to read. One simply can't hope to write to a number of different people, you know, because any spare time going one wants to use for sleep. I'm sorry I've omitted to tell you about some things I promised to explain, and must try to do better.

As to the time I saw into the Boche trenches while we were in for instruction, that was nothing really; due to my own stupidity, as a matter of fact, and I dare say that's why I said nothing about it. It was our second night in for instruction, and the Company we were with was sending out a small bombing patrol, so, of course, I asked if I could go too, and see what was to be seen. The O.C. of the Company very kindly let me go, and take with me Corporal Slade, of my platoon, an excellent chap, and very keen to learn. I wish he could have had a better teacher.

While close to the Boche wire our little party—only five, all told—sighted a Boche patrol quite twenty strong, and our officer in charge very properly gave the word to retire to a flank and get back to our own trench, or, rather, to a sap leading from it, so as to give warning of the Boche patrol. This was where, in my experience, I went wrong and led Slade astray. I was very curious, of course, to have a good look at the Boche patrol—the first I'd seen of the enemy in the open—and, like a fool, managed to get detached from the other three of our lot, Slade sticking close to me with a confidence I didn't deserve.

When I realised that the others were clean out of sight, and the Boche party too, I made tracks as quickly as I could—crawling, you know—as I believed for our line, cursing myself for not having a compass, a mistake you may be sure I shall not make again. Just then a regular firework display of flares went up from the Boche line, and they opened a hot burst of machine-gun fire. We lay as close as we could in the soggy grass, Slade and myself, and got no harm. Things were lively for a while, with lots of fire from both sides, and more light from both sides than was comfortable.

Later, when things had quietened down, we got on the move again, and presently, after a longish crawl through barbed wire, reached the parapet, and were just about to slide in, side by side, pretty glad to be back in the trench, when a fellow came round the traverse—we were just beside a traverse—growled something, and jabbed at Slade with his bayonet.

Bit confusing, wasn't it? Makes you think pretty quick. I suppose we realised we had struck the Boche line instead of our own in something under the twentieth part of a second, and what followed was too confused for me to remember much about. No doubt we both recognised the necessity for keeping that chap quiet in the same fraction of time that we saw we had reached the wrong trenches. I can remember the jolly feeling of my two thumbs in his throat. It was jolly, really, though I dare say it will seem beastly to you. And I suspect Slade did for the chap. We were lying on a duck-board at the bottom of the trench, and I know my little trench dagger fell and made a horrid clatter, which I made sure would bring more Boches. But it didn't.

I am sorry to say I left the little dagger there, but I collared the Boche's rifle and bayonet, thinking that was the only weapon I had, and clean forgetting the two Mills bombs in my pockets. Slade was a perfect brick and behaved all through like the man he is. We were anxious to make tracks without unnecessary delay, but, being there, thought we might as well have a look at the trench. We crept along two bays without hearing or seeing a soul. And then we heard a man struggling in deep mud and cursing in fluent German. I've thought since, perhaps, we ought to have waited for him and tried a bomb on him. But at the same time came several other different voices, and I whispered to Slade to climb out and followed him myself without wasting any time. The trench was a rotten bad one at this point, worse, I think, than any of ours. And I was thankful for it, because if it had been good those Boches would surely have been on us before we could get out. As it was, the mud held them, and the noises they made grovelling about in it prevented them from hearing our movements, though we made a good deal of noise, worrying through their wire, especially as I was dragging that Boche rifle, with bayonet fixed.

There were glimmering hints of coming daylight by the time we got into the open, which made it a bit easier to take a bearing, and also pretty necessary to have done with it quickly, because in another half-hour we should have been a target for the whole Boche line. Here again Slade was first-rate. He recognised a big shell-hole in the ground, which he had noticed was about fifty yards north of the head of a sap leading from our own line, and that guided us in to the same opening in our wire from which we had originally started. Fine chap, Slade! Three minutes later we were in our own trench, and I got a good tot of rum for both of us from the O.C. Company, who'd made up his mind he'd have to report us "Missing." So, you see, you didn't miss much by not being told all about this before, except an instance of carelessness on my part, which might have been more costly if I hadn't had a most excellent chap with me. "The Peacemaker's" going to recommend him for Lance-Sergeant's stripes, by the way, when we get out of trenches this time.

You know, that question of yours about what it is really "like" here at the front isn't nearly so easy to answer as you might suppose. You must just be patient. I'll tell you things as I learn them and see them, gradually; and, gradually, too, you must try to piece 'em together till they make some sort of picture for you. If I were a real writer I might be able to make it all clear in one go, but—well, it's not easy.

I've told you about the trenches on the way up from Ambulance Corner, the communication trenches, that is, running up at right angles to the firing line. The chief difference between the firing line and the communication trenches, of course, is that it faces the Boche front line, running roughly parallel to it, and that, say eighteen inches above the bottom of it, there is a fire-step running along its front side. When you get up on that you have a fire position: that is, you can see over the parapet, across No Man's Land, to the Boche front line, and fire a rifle.

The lines of trenches are not straight, of course. They curve about according to the nature of the ground. Running out from them on both sides towards the enemy lines there are saps, at the end of which we station listening posts at night with wired-up telephone and bell connections with the firing line. Roughly speaking, a fire trench is cut out rather like this:

with traverses every twenty or thirty paces, so as to make it impossible for an enemy on your flank to get what is called enfilade fire down and along the trench. Enfilade fire is deadly, of course. Fire from the front, on the other hand, if it falls short or overshoots the mark even by a yard lands in front of or behind your trench. You get that?

And what does it look like when one stares out from one's front trench? Well, it depends. It's always pretty queer, but it's queerest at night, when the Boche is sending up his ghostly flares, or when there's enough moonlight to make you fancy all the time you can see all manner of things. First, there's your own parapet, anything from five to five-and-twenty feet of it, sloping gradually down to the open grass of No Man's Land. That's what stops the bullets destined for your head. When Boche shells are well enough placed to blow it in, you must build it up again as soon as you can, or the bit of trench behind it will be exposed, and as your men pass to and fro there will be casualties.

Well, then, anything from ten to twenty or thirty feet beyond the lip of your trench, your wire entanglements begin, and extend, say a good thirty or forty paces out into No Man's Land. You've seen barbed-wire entanglements in pictures: row after row of stakes (some of ours are iron screw standards now, that can be set up silently) laced together across and across by barbed wire, forming an obstacle which it is particularly difficult and beastly to get through, especially at night, which, of course, is the only time you could even approach it without being blown to bits.

Here and there all through our wire are old bells, tin cans, bits of flattened tin, and oddments of that sort hanging loosely, so that when even a rat begins cavorting about in the wire at night your sentries know about it, and the Boche is neither so slim nor so agile as a rat. Say that he comes by night with bombs in his hand. One cannot throw a bomb with any accuracy of aim more than twenty or thirty yards. Boche finds himself stopped by our wire, say fifty or sixty yards from our line. If he slowly worms himself in, say twenty paces, without being heard—and he won't—and lobs a bomb at our line, imagine the hail of lead that's coming about him as he tries to wriggle his way back through the wire after shying his bomb!

But, as a matter of fact, the Boche is not good at that game. He does not shine at all at creep-in on our line. When he leaves his trenches at all he seems to prefer coming out in pretty close formation, rubbing shoulders with his pals. Our fellows are a good deal better at sculling about over the sticks than he is.

Here and there in the wire, among the tin cans and things, you can see fluttering bits of weather-worn uniform and old rags, and, at times, things more gruesome. Beyond the wire you see the strip of No Man's Land. Where we are, the average width of it is round about a hundred yards. In some places it's more, and in one place we can see, perhaps a mile off, it narrows down to much less than half that. Then begins the Boche wire, and through and across that you see the Boche front line, very much like your own, too much like your own to be very easily distinguished from it at night.

But that's a wonderful thing, that strip we call No Man's Land, running from the North Sea to Switzerland, five hundred miles. All the way along that line, day and night, without a moment's cessation, through all these long months, men's eyes have been glaring across that forsaken strip, and lead has been flying to and fro over it. To show yourself in it means death. But I have heard a lark trilling over it in the early morning as sweetly as any bird ever sang over an English meadow. A lane of death, five hundred miles long, strewn from end to end with the remains of soldiers! And to either side of it, throughout the whole of these five hundred miles, a warren of trenches, dug-outs, saps, tunnels, underground passages, inhabited, not by rabbits, but by millions of rats, it's true, and millions of hiving, busy men, with countless billions of rounds of death-dealing ammunition, and a complex organisation as closely ordered and complete as the organisation of any city in England!

It's also inhabited at this moment by one man who simply must stop scribbling, and have some grub before going on duty. This one among the millions, with the very healthy appetite, manages, in despite of all the strafing, to think quite a lot about you, and hopes you will go on thinking equally cheerily of him—your

"Temporary Gentleman."

THE DUG-OUT

Here's an odd coincidence. The second sentence in your letter that reached me last night (with our rations of candles and coke) says: "Do tell me just what a dug-out is like." You are always asking me what something or other is "like," which forces upon me the sad conclusion that my letters are not in the least descriptive. But, "Do not shoot the pianist: he is doing his best," and if I had the pen of a readier writer you may be sure I'd use it. Yet the odd thing is, with regard to this particular command for information, I have the pen of a readier writer. You know Taffy Morgan—Billy—of our Company? Well, it seems he's quite a bit of a writer, and occasionally sends things home to his father who, is trying to keep a consecutive narrative of the doings of the Battalion. Now last night, within an hour of getting your letter, I read a thing Taffy showed me that he was sending home, all about a Company Headquarters dug-out in the line: much more decent than my scribbles. So I've asked him to let me copy some of it, and here it is pat, in answer to your question:

"'Dug-out' is the only word for it. I don't know who did the christening, but it is, like so many words and phrases adopted without question by Tommy at the front, the one proper, exact, and adequate name for the places we inhabit in the trenches. The particular dug-out I have in mind is a Company Headquarters, situated, like a good many others, in a loop trench, perhaps seventy to a hundred yards long, which curves round at a distance of twenty or thirty yards in rear of the fire-trench. The average depth of this little back-water of a trench is, say, seven feet. It was made by the French before we took over, and is very wide at the top. It has no made parapet, but is just a gaping ditch, its ragged, receding top edges eight or ten feet apart, the lower part, in which one walks, being two to three feet wide. The bottom of this ditch is duck-walked: that is to say, it has wooden gratings six feet long and eighteen inches wide laid along it. Each length of duck-walk is supported at either end by a trestle driven deep down into the mud.

"Here and there at a bend in the trench there will be a gap of several inches between duck-walks. Again one finds a place where one or two slats have been broken. These are cheerless pitfalls on a dark night, in which it is easy to sink one leg in mud or water over the knee. In places a duck-walk has canted over by losing its bearings on the trestle at one corner, giving the whole a treacherous list to one side or the other, simple enough to negotiate by day, but unpleasant for anyone hurrying along at night. Still, the trench is 'ducked' and, so far, luxurious, and a vast improvement on the sort of trench (common over the way among the Boches, I believe) in which men lose their boots, and have to be dug out themselves.

"It happens that my picture of this Company Headquarters dug-out is a three o'clock in the morning picture: moonless, and the deadest hour of the night, when Brother Boche is pretty generally silent, save for a mechanical sort of dropping rifle fire: a fire which one knows somehow, from its sound, means nothing, unless perhaps it means a certain number of German sentries sleepily proving to themselves that they are awake. In the same desultory fashion, Boche, nearly two hundred yards away across the wire entanglements and the centre strip of No Man's Land, sends up a flare of parachute light every few minutes, which, for half a minute, fills our black ditch with a queer, ghostly sort of radiance, making its dank and jagged sides to gleam again, and drawing curses from anyone feeling his way along it, even as motor lights in a country lane at home make a pedestrian curse on a dark night.

"As one gropes along this ditch one comes to narrow gaps here and there in the side farthest from the enemy. These lead to all kinds of odd necessary places: the homes of signallers, runners, and others, refuse pits, bomb and trench stores, and so on. Presently a thin streak of light shows like a white string in the blackness. This is one of the gaps, about four feet high and eighteen inches wide. A dripping waterproof sheet hangs as a curtain over this gap: the white string is the light from within escaping down one side of the sheet. Lift the sheet to one side, take two steps down and forward—the sheet dripping on your neck the while—and you are in the Company Headquarters dug-out: a hole dug out of the back of the ditch, its floor two feet below the level of the duck-boards outside, its internal dimensions ten feet by eight by six.

"At the back of this little cave, facing you as you enter—and unless you go warily you are apt to enter with a rush, landing on the earthen floor in a sitting position, what with the wet slime on your gum boots and the steps—are two bunks, one above the other, each two feet wide and made of wire netting stretched on rough stakes fastened to stout poles and covered more or less by a few empty sand-bags. One of these is the bunk of the O.C. Company, used alternatively by one of his subalterns. In the other, a Platoon Commander lies now asleep, one gum-booted leg, mud-caked well above the knee, dangling over the front edge, a goatskin coat over his shoulders, his cap jammed hard down over his eyes to shut out the light of the candle which, stayed firmly to the newspaper tablecloth by a small island of its own grease, burns as cheerily as it can in this rather draughty spot, sheltered a little from the entrance by a screen consisting of a few tins half full of condensed milk, butter, sugar, and the like. The officer in the bunk is sleeping as though dead, and the candle-light catching the mud-flecked stubble on his chin suggests that his turn in the trenches should be at least half over. Another few days should bring him to billets and shaving water."

(Here, then, in addition to the description of a dug-out, you have a portrait of your "Temporary Gentleman," rather unmercifully touched in, I thought!)

"The table—say, 30 inches by 20 inches—was made from a packing-case, and is perched on rough stake legs against the earthen side of the dug-out, with a shelf over it which was formerly a case holding two jars of rum. On the shelf are foodstuffs, Very lights, a couple of rockets, a knobkerrie, a copy of Punch, a shortbread tin full of candles, a map, an automatic pistol, and, most curiously, a dust-encrusted French cookery-book, which has taken on the qualities of an antique, and become a kind of landlord's fixture among 'trench stores' in the eyes of the ever-changing succession of company commanders who have 'taken over,' week in and week out, since the French occupation in '14.

"Hung about the sides of the dug-out are half-empty canvas packs or valises, field-glasses, a couple of periscopes, a Very pistol, two sticks caked all over with dry mud, an oilskin coat or two similarly varnished over with the all-pervading mud of the trench, a steel helmet, a couple of pairs of field boots and half a dozen pictures from illustrated papers, including one clever drawing of a grinning cat, having under it the legend, 'Smile, damn you!' The field boots are there, and not in use, because the weather is of the prevalent sort, wet, and the tenants of the place are living in what the returns call 'boots, trench, gum, thigh.' Overhead is stretched across the low roof tarred felt. Above that are rough-hewn logs, then galvanised iron and stones and earth: not shell-proof, really, but bullet- and splinter-proof, and for the most part weather-proof—at least as much so as the average coat sold under that description.

"The trench outside is very still just now, but inside the dug-out there is plenty of movement. All round about it, and above and below, the place is honeycombed by rats—brown rats with whitish bellies, big as young cats, heavy with good living; blundering, happy-go-lucky, fearless brutes, who do not bother to hunt the infinitely nimbler mice who at this moment are delicately investigating the tins of foodstuffs within a few inches of the head of the O.C. Company. The rats are variously occupied: as to a couple of them, matrons, in opposite corners of the roof, very obviously in suckling their young, who feed with awful zest; as to half a dozen others, in courting, during which process they keep up a curious kind of crooning, chirruping song wearisome to human ears; and as to the numerous remainder, in conducting a cross-country steeplechase of sorts, to and fro and round and round on the top side of the roofing felt, which their heavy bodies cause to bulge and sag till one fancies it must give way.

"There is a rough rickety stool beside the table. On this is seated the O.C. Company, his arms outspread on the little ledge of a table, his head on his arms, his face resting on the pages of an open Army Book 153, in which, half an hour ago, he wrote his morning situation report, in order that his signallers might inform Battalion Headquarters, nearly a mile away down the communication trench to the rear, with sundry details, that there was nothing doing beyond the normal intermittent strafing of a quiet night. The O.C. Company is asleep. A mouse is clearing its whiskers of condensed milk within two inches of his left ear, and the candle is guttering within two inches of his cap-peak. During the past few days he has had four or five such sleeps as this, half an hour or so at a time, and no more, for there has been work toward in the line, involving exposure for men on the parapet and so forth, of a sort which does not make for restfulness among O.C. Companies.

"There comes a quiet sound of footfalls on the greasy duck-boards outside. Two mice on the table sit bolt upright to listen. The cross-country meeting overhead is temporarily suspended. The O.C. Company's oilskin-covered shoulders twitch nervously. The mother rats continue noisily suckling their young, though one warily pokes its sharp nose out over the edge of the felt, sniffing, inquiringly. Then the waterproof sheet is drawn aside, and the O.C. Company sits up with a jerk. A signaller on whose leather jerkin the raindrops glisten in the flickering candle-light thrusts head and shoulders into the dug-out.

"'Message from the Adjutant, sir!'

"The O.C. reads the two-line message, initials the top copy for return to the signaller, spikes the carbon copy on a nail overhead, where many others hang, glances at his wrist-watch, and says wearily:

"'Well, what are the signallers strafing about, anyhow? It's ten minutes before time now. Here you are!'

"He tears two written pages from the Army message book which was his pillow, signs them, and hands them up to the signaller.

"'Call the Sergeant-Major on your way back, and tell him I've gone down to the sap-head. He can bring the wiring party along right away. It's nearly three o'clock. Send a runner to tell the officer on duty I'm going out myself with this party. You might just remind the Sergeant-Major I want two stretcher-bearers at the sap-head. Tell 'em to keep out of sight till the others are out over the parapet. Right! Messages will go to Mr. ——, of course, while I'm out.'

"Brother Boche may remain quiet. Three o'clock is a good quiet time. And there is no moon. But, Brother Boche being dead quiet just now, may conceivably have patrols out there in No Man's Land. They may carry valuable information quickly to his line, and two or three machine-guns may presently open up on the O.C. Company and his wiring party, who, again, may be exposed by means of flare lights from the other side. One hopes not. Meanwhile, after a glance round, the O.C. picks up his mud-caked leather mitts, settles the revolver pouch on his belt, blows out the guttering candle, feels his way out past the dripping waterproof sheet into the black trench, and leaves the dug-out to his sleeping brother officer (who was on deck from 10 to 1, and will be out again an hour before dawn) and the rats.

"Theoretically, this O.C. Company may be himself as much in need of sleep as anyone in the trench. Actually, however, apart from his needs, he is personally responsible for whatever may happen in quite a long stretch of dark, mysterious trench: of trench which in one moment may be converted by the ingenious Boche into a raging hell of paralysing gas and smoke, of lurid flame and rending explosion. German officers seated in artillery dug-outs a mile or so away across the far side of No Man's Land may bring about that transformation in one moment. They did it less than a week ago, though, by reason of unceasing watchfulness on this side, it availed them nothing. They may be just about to do it now, and, unlike the average of German O.C. Companies, our officers never ask their men to face any kind of danger which they themselves do not face with them. And so, for this particular O.C. Company, the interior of that queer little dug-out (where the men's rum stands in jars under the lower bunk, and letters from home are scanned, maps pored over, and reports and returns made out) does not exactly bring unmixed repose. But the rats love it."

So there you are! By the judicious picking of Taffy's brains I have been enabled to present you with a much better picture of a dug-out than my own unaided pen could give. Reading over, there seems something melancholy and sombre about it; I don't know why. It's a jolly little dug-out, and Taffy's a thundering fine officer; nothing in the least melancholy about him. Then why—? Oh, well, I guess it's his Celtic blood. Maybe he's got a temperament. I must tell him so. By the way, that wiring job he mentions came off all right; a nasty exposed place, but "the Peacemaker" got his party through without a single casualty, or, as the men always say, "Casuality."

Taffy writes a much better letter, doesn't he? than your

"Temporary Gentleman."

A BOMBING SHOW

Very many thanks for the parcel with the horse-hide mitts and the torch refills, both of which will be greatly appreciated. The mitts are the best things of the kind I've seen for trench work, and as for electric torches, I don't know what we should do without them.

I've come below for a sleep, really. Taffy Morgan was very much off colour yesterday, and is far from fit to-day. I had to take his duty as well as my own last night, so came off pretty short in the matter of rest. But I must stop to tell you about the lark we had last night; the jolliest thing that's happened since we came in, and no end of a score for "A" Company. My batman tells me "B" are mad as hatters about it.

Our signalling officer happened to be along the front yesterday afternoon with a brand-new telescope that someone had sent the C.O., a very fine instrument. Signals wasn't interested in our bit of line, as it happens, but was dead nuts on some new Boche machine-gun emplacement or other away on "B's" left. When he was coming back through our line I got him to lend me the new glass while he had some tea and wrote reports in our dug-out. Perhaps you think there's not much need of a telescope when the Boche line is less than a couple of hundred yards away. Well, now you'd hardly believe how difficult it is to make things out. At this time of the year the whole of this place is full of mist, for one thing. And then, you see, the ground in front is studded all over with barbed wire, stakes, long rank grass, things thrown out: here and there an old log, and, here and there, of course, a dead body. One has to look along the ground level, since to look from a higher level would mean exposure, and I can assure you it's surprisingly easy to miss things. I've wasted a good many rounds myself, firing at old rags or bits of wood, or an old cape in the grass among the Boche wire, feeling sure I'd got a sniper. The ground is pretty much torn up, too, you understand, by shells and stuff, and that makes it more difficult.

Well, I was looking out from a little sheltered spot alongside the entrance to what we call Stinking Sap. It has rather a rottener smell than most trenches, I think. And all of a sudden I twigged something that waked me right up. It was nothing much: just a shovel sticking up against a little mound. But it led to other things. A yard away from where this shovel lay the C.O.'s fine glass enabled me to make out a gap in the wet, misty grass. You may be sure I stared jolly hard, and presently the whole thing became clear to me. The Boches had run out a new sap to fully sixty yards from their fire trench, which at this particular point is rather far from ours: over 250 yards, I suppose. It was right opposite our own Stinking Sap, and I suppose the head of it was not more than 100 yards from the head of Stinking Sap. There was no Boche working there then; not a sign of any movement. I made sure of that. Then I got my compass and trench map, and took a very careful bearing. And then I toddled round to Company Headquarters and got hold of "the Peacemaker," without letting Signals know anything about it. If the O.C. liked to let Battalion Headquarters know, that was his business.

Of course, "the Peacemaker" was delighted. "It's perfectly clear they must have cut it last night," he said. "And as sure as God made little apples, they'll be going on with it to-night. Let's see, the moon rises about 9.45. Splendid! They'll get to work as soon as it's dark."

He was awfully decent about it, and agreed to let me go, since I'd had the luck to spot it. As a matter of fact, he did the more important spotting himself. He twigged what I'd overlooked: a whacking big shell-hole, shallow but wide, about fifteen or twenty feet to one side of their sap-head; an absolutely ideal spot for cover, and no more than a hundred yards from the head of Stinking Sap. I decided to take Corporal Slade with me, because he's such a fine bomber, besides being as cool as a cucumber and an all-round good chap. You remember he was with me that time in Master Boche's trench. Somehow, the thing got round before tea-time, and the competition among the men was something awful. When Slade gave it out that I was taking all the men I wanted from No. 1 Platoon, there was actually a fight between one of my lot and a fellow named Ramsay, of No. 3 Platoon; a draper, I'll trouble you, and a pillar of his chapel at home. Then a deputation of the other Platoon Sergeants waited on "the Peacemaker," and in the end, to save bloodshed, I agreed to take Corporal Slade and one man from my own Platoon, and one man from each of the other three Platoons. To call for volunteers for work over the parapet with our lot is perfectly hopeless. You must detail your men, or the whole blessed Company would swarm out over the sticks every time, especially if there's the slightest hint of raiding or bombing.

"The Peacemaker's" idea was that we must reach that shell-hole from the end of Stinking Sap, if possible, before the Boche started work in his new sap, because once he started he'd be sure to have a particularly sharp look-out kept, and might very well have a covering party outside as well. Before it was dark my fellows were champing their bits in Stinking Sap, fretting to be off. If one gave the beggars half a chance they'd be out in the open in broad daylight. But, of course, I kept 'em back. There was no reason why Boche should be in a violent hurry to start work, and I was most anxious he shouldn't suspect that we suspected anything.

As it turned out, we were all lying in that shell-hole close to his new sap for three-quarters of an hour before a single Boche made a move. There was a fine rain all the time, and it was pitch dark. The only thing we didn't like was the fact that all the flares and parachute lights ever made seemed to be being sent up from the Boche line, right alongside this new sap. However, we lay perfectly still and flat, hands covered and faces down, and as long as you do that all the flares in the world won't give you away much, in ground as full of oddments and unevenness as that is.

By and by Slade gave a little tug at my jerkin. I listened hard, and just made out footsteps, probably in the Boche fire trench itself, near the entrance to their new sap. Two or three minutes later we began really to enjoy ourselves. As far as we could make out Fritz hadn't a notion that we were on to his game. Six or eight of 'em came shuffling along the sap, carrying picks and shovels, and jabbering and growling away nineteen to the dozen. We could hear every sound. One fellow, anyhow, was smoking. We got the whiff of that. We could hear 'em spit, and, very nearly, we could hear them breathe. I did wish I knew a little more German than "Donnerwetter" and "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?"

I could feel the man on my left (the draper from No. 3) quivering like a coursing greyhound in a leash, and had to whisper to him to wait for the word. But Corporal Slade on my right might have been on the barrack square. I saw him use a match to pick his teeth while he listened. I'd rehearsed my fellows letter perfect in our own trench before we started, and when the Boches were fairly under way digging, I gave the signal with my left hand. There was a bomb in my right. Waiting for it as I was, I could distinctly hear the safety-pins come out of our six bombs, and could even hear the breathed murmur of the pugnacious draper at my shoulder:

"A hundred an' one, a hundred an' two, a hundred an' three!" (He was timing the fuse of his bomb, exactly as I'd told 'em.)

And then we tore a big hole in the night. Our six bombs landed, one on the edge and the other five plumb in the sap-head before us, right in the middle of the six or eight Boches digging there. Two seconds after they left our hands they did their job. It was less than two seconds really. And when the rending row was done we heard only one Boche moaning, so I knew that at least six or seven were "gone West" for keeps, and would strafe no more Englishmen.

Now the idea had been that directly our job was done we should bolt for the head of Stinking Sap. But, while we'd been lying there, it had occurred to me that the Boches, knowing all about what distance bombs could be thrown, and that we must be lying in the open near their sap-head, ought to be able to sweep that ground with machine-gun fire before we could get to Stinking Sap, and that, having done that, they would surely send a whole lot more men down their new sap, to tackle what was left of us that way. Therefore I'd made each of my fellows carry four bombs in his pockets: twenty-four among the lot of us. And we'd only used six. Quite enough, too, for the Boches in that sap. Therefore, again, we now lay absolutely still, and just as close as wax, while Fritz rained parachute lights, stars, flares, and every kind of firework in the sky, and, just as I had fancied, swept his sap-head with at least a thousand rounds of machine-gun bullets, not one of which so much as grazed us, where we lay spread-eagled in the mud of that shell-hole.

And then—dead silence.

"Get your bombs ready, lads," I told my fellows. In another few seconds we heard the Boches streaming along their narrow new sap. They took it for granted we had cleared back to our line, and they made no attempt to disguise their coming. In fact, from the rate at which they rushed along that narrow ditch I could almost swear that some came without rifles or anything. We waited till the near end of the sap was full, and then: "A hundred and one," etc. We gave 'em our second volley, and immediately on top of it our third. It must have been a regular shambles. Slade and I, by previous arrangement, lobbed ours over as far as ever we could to the left, landing quite near the beginning of the sap, and so getting the Boches who were only just leaving their own fire trench. Then I laid my hand on the draper to prevent his throwing, and Slade and the other three gave their last volley, and bolted full pelt for Stinking Sap.

There was no bucking at all in the part of the sap near us. The Boches there wouldn't trouble anyone any more, I fancy. But a few seconds after Slade disappeared, we heard a fresh lot start on their way down the sap from their fire trench. We gave 'em up to about "A hundred and three" and a half, and then we let 'em have our last two bombs, well to the left, and ourselves made tracks like greased lightning for Stinking Sap. The luck held perfectly, and Slade was hauling the draper in over the parapet of Stinking Sap before a sound came from the Boches' machine-guns. And then, by Gad! they opened on us. They holed my oilskin coat for me, as I slid in after Ramsay, and spoiled it. I've jotted it down against 'em and in due course they shall pay. But not one of my crowd got a scratch, and we reckon to have accounted for at the very least twenty Boches, maybe double that—a most splendid lark.

What makes "B" Company rather mad is that, strictly speaking, this new Boche sap is a shade nearer their line than ours. The C.O. came up to look at it this morning, on the strength of our O.C.'s morning situation report, and was most awfully nice to me about it. He said we did well to wait for the Boches' coming down from their line after our first scoop, and that plans must be made to fit circumstances, and not held to be ends in themselves, and all that kind of thing—initiative, you know, and so on—very nice indeed he was. And the best of it is our artillery has registered on that sap this morning, and this afternoon is just about going to blow it across the Rhine. So altogether "A" Company is feeling pretty good, if you please, and has its tail well up. So has your

"Temporary Gentleman."

OVER THE PARAPET

We are back again in billets, but so close to the line this time that it's more like being in support trenches. That is to say, one hears all the firing, and knows just what is happening in the line all the time. Also, we do carrying fatigues in the trenches at night. Still, it's billets, and not bad. One can get a bath, and one can sleep dry. I must tell you about billets sometime. At the moment the letter from you lying in front of me contains clear orders. I am to tell you what patrolling is—quite a big order.

Well, there are many different kinds of patrols, you know, but so far as we are concerned, here in trenches, they boil down to two sorts: observation patrols and fighting patrols, such as bombing and raiding parties. It's all night work, of course, since one cannot do anything over the parapet by day without getting shot; anything, that is, except a regular attack preceded by bombardment of the Boche lines. On the whole, I think it's about the most interesting part of our work, and I think it's safe to say it's a part in which our fellows can run rings round the Boches. In masses (well primed with rum; ether and oxygen, too, they say) the Boche can do great things. He will advance, as it were blindly, in the face of any kind of fire you like; even the kind that accounts for sixty or seventy per cent. of him in a hundred yards. But when he comes to act as an individual, or in little groups, as in patrolling—well, we don't think much of him. We think our worst is better than his best in all that sort of work. I'm perfectly certain that, man for man, the British and French troops are more formidable, harder to beat, better men all round, than the Boche.

The first kind of patrol I mentioned—observation—is part and parcel of our everyday routine in the firing line. This kind goes out every night, and often several times during the night, from every Company. Its main objective is observation: to get any information it can about the doings of the Hun, and to guard our line against surprise moves of any sort. But, though that's its main object, it does not go unarmed, of course, and, naturally, will not refuse a scrap if the chance comes. But it differs from a bombing or raiding patrol in that it does not go out for the purpose of fighting, and as a rule is not strong, numerically; usually not more than about half a dozen in the party. In some Companies observation patrols are often sent out under a good N.C.O. and no officer. We make a point of sending an officer always; not that we can't trust our N.C.O.'s; they're all right; but we talked it over, and decided we would rather one of us always went. As I said, it's interesting work, and work with possibilities of distinction in it, and we're all pretty keen on it. Every Company in the Battalion is. (Boche patrols, one gathers, hardly ever include an officer.)

With us, it is decided during the afternoon just what we are going to do that night in the patrol line, and the officer whose turn it is chooses his own men and N.C.O.'s. And within limits, you know, "the Peacemaker" lets us work out our own plans pretty much as we like, providing there's no special thing he wants done. It often happens, you see, that during daylight the sentries or the officer on duty have been able to make out with glasses some signs of work being done at night by the Boche, in his front line, or in a sap or a communication trench. Then that night it will be the job of the patrols to investigate that part of the opposite line very carefully. Perhaps half a dozen Boches will be found working somewhere where our patrol can wipe 'em out by lobbing a few bombs among 'em. That's a bit of real jam for the patrol. Or, again, they may observe something quite big: fifty to a hundred Boches carrying material and building an emplacement, or something of that kind. Then it will be worth while to get back quickly, having got an exact bearing on the spot, and warn the O.C. Company. He may choose to turn a couple of machine-guns loose suddenly on that spot, or he may find it better to telephone to Battalion Headquarters and let them know about it, so that, if they like, they can get our "heavies" turned on, and liven the Boche job up with a good shower of H.E., to smash the work, after a few rounds of shrap. to lay out the workers.

Then, again, if you all keep your eyes jolly well skinned, there's a sporting chance of getting another kind of luck. You may spot a Boche patrol while you're crawling about in No Man's Land. "B" Company had the luck to do that three nights ago, and our fellows are so envious now they all want to be patrolling at once; it's as much as one can do to keep them in the trench. They're simply aching to catch a Boche patrol out, and put the wind up "B." You see "B" lost two out of a Boche patrol of six; killing three and taking one prisoner. "A" can't say anything about it, of course, because we've not had the luck yet to see a Boche patrol. But God help its members when we do, for I assure you our fellows would rather die half a dozen times over than fail to wipe "B's" eye. It's the way they happen to be built. They don't wish the Boche any particular harm, but if they can get within sight of a Boche patrol, that patrol has just got to be scuppered without any possible chance of a couple getting clear. The performance of "B" has just got to be beaten, and soon.

Honestly, it isn't easy to hold these chaps back. The observation patrol I was out with the night before we came out of the trenches really needed holding. There were no Boche patrols for them to scupper, and just to humour the beggars I kept 'em out nearly an hour longer than I had any right to; and then, if you'll believe me, they were so disappointed at having to head back with nothing in the bag, so to say, that the Corporal was deputed to beg my permission for a little raid on the Huns' front trench. And there were just five of us, all told; our only weapons knobkerries and two bombs each, and my revolver and dagger.

By the way, the survivor of the Hun patrol that "B" rounded up was not the first prisoner taken by the Battalion. No; we had that honour nearly a week ago. A queer episode that, on our second night in. There was a bit of line on our extreme right which was neither for use nor ornament; a horrible place. It had been all blown in by trench mortars and oil-cans, and hardly had a strand of unbroken wire in front of it. (You may be sure it's in different shape now. We worked at it for two nights in succession, and made a good job of it.) Well, it was so bad for fifty yards or so that sentries could not occupy it properly; no fire-step left, and no cover worth speaking of. Taffy Morgan was nosing about in front of this bit just after dark, out beyond where the wire had been, marking places for new entanglements, when he spotted a big Boche patrol making slowly up that way from their front. They were fifteen or twenty strong.

Taffy lay very low, and crawled back into our line without being seen. Then he raced down the trench for his pet machine-gun—a Lewis, you know—and got it along there with a Corporal and a couple of machine-gunners in rather less than no time. By then the messenger he had sent off had got back with "the Peacemaker" and myself and the Sergeant-Major. We all kept as quiet as mice till we were able to make out the movement of the Boche patrol. We let them get fairly close—thirty or forty yards—and then let blaze at 'em, firing just as low as we could.

I suppose we gave 'em about four hundred rounds. We heard a bit of moaning after "the Peacemaker" gave the word to cease fire, and then, to our amazement, a Hun talking, apparently to another Boche, telling him to come on, and calling him some kind of a bad hat. I tell you, it was queer to listen to. The Boche who was doing the talking appeared to have worked a good bit down to the left of the bunch we had fired at, and had evidently got into our wire. We could hear him floundering among the tin cans.

"Don't fire," said "the Peacemaker." "We'll maybe get this chap alive." And, sure enough, the Boche began singing out to us now, asking first of all whether we were Prussian, and then trying a few phrases in French, including a continuously repeated: "Je suis fatigué!"

Most extraordinary it was. "The Peacemaker" couldn't tell him we were Prussian, but he kept inviting the fellow to come in, and telling him we wouldn't hurt him. Finally I took a man out and lugged the chap in out of the wire myself. We got tired of his floundering, and I guess he must have been tired of it too, for he was pretty badly cut by it. He had no rifle; nothing but a dagger; and the moment I got him into our trench he began catting all over the place; most deadly sick he was.

We led him off down the trench to the S.M.'s dug-out and gave him a drink of tea, and washed the wire cuts on his face and hands. He was a poor starveling-looking kind of a chap; a bank clerk from Heidelberg, as it turned out afterwards, and a Corporal. He told us he'd had nothing but rum, but we thought him under the influence of some drug; some more potent form of Dutch courage, such as the Huns use before leaving their trenches. Our M.O. told us afterwards he was very poorly nourished. We blindfolded him and took him down to Battalion Headquarters, and from there he would be sent on to the Brigade. We never knew if they got any useful information out of him; but he was the Battalion's first prisoner. The other Boches we got in that night were dead. That burst of M.G. fire had laid them out pretty thoroughly, nine of 'em; and a small patrol we kept out there wounded three or four more who came much later—I suppose to look for their own wounded.

There's a creepy kind of excitement about patrol work which makes it fascinating. If there's any light at all, you never know who's drawing a bead on you. If there's no light, you never know what you're going to bump into at the next step. It's very largely hands-and-knees' work, and our chaps just revel in it. My first, as you know, landed me in the Boche trenches; and that's by no means a very uncommon thing either, though it ought never to happen if you have a good luminous-faced compass and the sense to refer to it often enough. My second patrol was a bit more successful. I'll tell you about that next time. Meanwhile, I hope what I've said will make you fancy you know roughly what patrol work is, though, to be sure, I feel I haven't given you the real thing the way Taffy could if he set out to write about it. He could write it almost better perhaps than he could do it. He's a wee bit too jerky and impulsive, too much strung up rather, for patrol work. My thick-headed sort of plodding is all right on patrol; suits the men first-rate. I suppose it kind of checks the excitement and keeps it within bounds. But you mark my words, our fellows will get a Boche patrol before long, and when they do I'll wager they won't lose any of 'em.

We're going to play a team of "B" Company at football to-morrow afternoon, if the Boche doesn't happen to be running an artillery strafe. We play alongside the cemetery, and for some unknown reason the Boche gunners seem to be everlastingly ranging on it, as though they wanted to keep our dead from resting. We're all as fit and jolly as can be, especially your

"Temporary Gentleman."

THE NIGHT PATROL

Here in billets the amount of letter-writing the men do is something appalling—for the officers who have to censor their letters. As you know, our training in England included some time in four different parts of the country, and our fellows have sweethearts in each place. And they seem to get parcels from most of 'em, too. Then there are the home letters. They all describe their writers as being "in the pink," and getting on "champion," as, I believe, I told you before.

My billet—or, rather, our billet, for all "A" Company officers are under the one roof here—is in the church house, and there's a candlestick three feet high in the bedroom I share with Taffy. There's no glass in the windows, and the roof at one end has had a shell through it, and so the room gets a bit swampy. Otherwise, the place is all right. Our own batteries near by shake it up at times, and the shell-holes, in the road outside show it's had some very narrow squeaks; but neither it nor the church has suffered very much, though they stand well up on a hill, less than half a mile from our support line of trenches, which the Battalion billeted here mans in event of alarm—gas attack, you know, or anything of that sort. So while we're here we sleep fully equipped at night. But in our next week out, at the village farther back, we are more luxurious, and undress of a night.

But I promised to tell you about that second patrol of mine. We were greatly interested in some kind of an erection we could see just behind the Boche front line on our left. All we could see was sand-bags; but, somehow, it looked too big and massive for a mere machine-gun emplacement, and we were all most anxious to find out what it could be. So "the Peacemaker" agreed that I should take a patrol that night and try to investigate. This was the first patrol we sent out as a Company in the line on our own. My first was when we were in with another Company for instruction, you know, and they apparently had not noticed this sand-bag structure. At all events, they made no report to "the Peacemaker" about it when we took over.

The moon was not due to rise till about eleven that night, so I decided to go out at nine. The Company Sergeant-Major asked if he could come, so I arranged to take him and one Platoon scout from each Platoon. They had none of them been out as yet, and we wanted them to have practice. Getting out into No Man's Land marks a distinct epoch in a man's training for trench warfare, you know. If it happens that he has some considerable time in trenches without ever going over the parapet, he's apt to be jumpy when he does get out. I fancy that must be one reason why the Boches make such a poor show in the matter of individual effort of an aggressive sort. They're so trench-bound that their men seem no use out of trenches, except in massed formation.

Don't make any mistake about it; there's some excuse for a man being jumpy over the parapet when he's never had a chance of getting accustomed to it. That's why I think our O.C. is very wise in the way he tries to give all the men a turn at work over the parapet, wiring, patrolling, improving saps, and what not: because it's a pretty eerie business until you get used to it. Behind our line you have graves and crosses, and comparatively friendly things of all kinds—rubbish, you know, and oddments discarded by fellow humans no longer ago than a matter of hours. But out in No Man's Land, of course, the dominant factor is the swift, death-dealing bullet, and the endless mass of barbed-wire entanglements which divides Boches from Britons and Frenchmen for so many hundreds of miles. There are plenty of dead things out there, but, barring the rats, when you get any other movement in No Man's Land you may reckon it's enemy movement: creeping men with bombs and daggers, who may have been stalking you or may not have seen you. But it wouldn't do to reckon much on anyone's not having seen you, because if there's one place in the world in which every man's ears and eyes are apt to be jolly well open it's out there in the slimy darkness of No Man's Land.

You may very well chance to stick your hand in the upturned face of a far-gone corpse, as I did my first time out; but if you do so you mustn't shiver—far less grunt—because shivering may make your oilskin coat or something else rustle, and draw fire on you and your party. So a man needs to have his wits about him when he's over the parapet, and the cooler he keeps and the more deliberate are his movements the better for all concerned. One needn't loaf, but, on the other hand, it's rather fatal to hurry, and quite fatal to flurry, especially when you're crawling among wire with loose strands of it and "giant gooseberries" of the prickly stuff lying round in all directions on the ground to catch your hands and knees and hold you up. If you lose your head or do anything to attract attention, your number's pretty well up. But, on the other hand, if you keep perfectly cool and steady, making no sound whatever happens, and lying perfectly flat and still while Boche flares are up or their machine-guns are trying to locate you, it's surprising how very difficult it is for the Hun to get you, and what an excellent chance you have of returning to your own line with a whole skin.

I had an exact compass bearing on the spot we wanted to investigate, taken from the sap on our left from which we were starting. "The Peacemaker" ran his own hands over the men of the party before we climbed out, to make sure everyone had remembered to leave all papers and things of that sort behind. (One goes pretty well stripped for these jobs, to avoid anything useful falling perchance into Boche hands.) We each carried a couple of bombs, the men had knobkerries, and I had revolver and dagger, to be on the safe side. But we were out for information, not scrapping.

It was beautifully dark, and, starting from a sap-head, clear of our own wire, we crossed the open very quickly, hardly so much as stooping, till we were close to the Boche wire, when a burst of machine-gun fire from them sent us to ground. The Companies on each flank in our line had been warned we were out. This is always done to prevent our own men firing at us. Such little fire as was coming from our line was high, and destined for the Boche support lines and communications; nothing to hurt us.

Now, when we began crawling through the Boche wire I made the sort of mistake one does make until experience teaches. I occupied myself far too much with what was under my nose, and too little with what lay ahead—and too little with my compass. To be sure, there's a good deal in the Boche wire which rather forces itself upon the attention of a man creeping through it on hands and knees. The gooseberries and loose strands are the devil. Still, it is essential to keep an eye on the compass, and to look ahead, as well as on the ground under one's nose, lest you over-shoot your mark or drop off diagonally to one side or the other of it. I know a good deal better now. But one has no business to make even one mistake, if one's a "Temporary Officer and Gentleman," because one's men have been taught to follow and trust one absolutely, and it's hardly ever only one's own safety that's at stake.

Suddenly I ran my face against the side of a "giant gooseberry" with peculiarly virulent prongs, and in that moment a bullet whizzed low over my head, and—here's the point—the bolt of the rifle from which that bullet came was pulled back and jammed home for the next shot—as it seemed right in my ear. We all lay perfectly flat and still. I could feel the Sergeant-Major's elbow just touching my left hip. Very slowly and quietly I raised my head enough to look round the side of that "giant gooseberry," and instinct made me look over my right shoulder.

We were less than ten paces from the Boche parapet. The great, jagged black parados, like a mountain range on a theatre drop scene, hung right over my shoulder against a sky which seemed now to have a most deadly amount of light in it. I was lying almost in a line with it, instead of at right angles to it. Just then, the sentry who had fired gave a little cough to clear his throat. It seemed he was actually with us. Then he fired again. I wondered if he had a bead on the back of my head. He was not directly opposite us, but a dozen paces or so along the line.

Now, by the queer twisty feeling that went down my spine when my eyes first lighted on that grim black line of parados just over my shoulder, I guessed how my men might be feeling. "Little blame to them if they show some panic," thinks I. I turned my face left, so as to look down at the Sergeant-Major's over my left shoulder. He'd seen that towering parados against the sky, and heard that sentry's cough and the jamming home of his rifle bolt. By twisting my head I brought my face close to the S.M.'s, and could see that he fancied himself looking right into his own end. I had to think quick. I know that man's mind like the palm of my hand, and I now know his splendid type: the English ex-N.C.O. of Marines, with later service in the Metropolitan Police—a magnificent blend. I also know the wonderful strength of his influence over the men, to whom he is experienced military professionalism, expertness incarnate. At present he felt we had come upon disaster.

"My Gawd, sir!" he breathed at me. "Why, we're on top of 'em!"

That was where I thought quick, and did a broad grin as I whispered to him: "Pretty good for a start—a damn fine place, Sergeant-Major. But we'll manage to get a bit nearer before we leave 'em, won't we?"

It worked like a charm, and I thanked God for the fine type he represents. It was as though his mind was all lighted up, and I could see the thoughts at work in it. "Oh, come! so it's all right, after all. My officer's quite pleased. He knew all about it and it's just what he wanted; so that's all right." These were the thoughts. And from that moment the S.M. began to regard the whole thing as a rather creditable lark, though the pit of his stomach had felt queer, as well it might, for a moment. And the wonderful thing was—there must be something in telepathy, you know—that this change seemed to communicate itself almost instantly to the men—bless their simple souls!—crouched round about behind. I'd no time to think of the grimness of it, after that. A kind of heat seemed to spread all over me from inside, and I had been cold. I think a mother must feel like that when danger threatens her kiddies. The thought in my mind was: "I've brought these fellows here in carelessness. I'll get 'em back with whole skins or I'll die at it."

I never had any Hymn of Hate feeling in my life, but I think I'd have torn half a dozen Boches in pieces with my hands before I'd have let 'em get at any of those chaps of mine that night.

Now I was free; I knew the men were all right. I whispered to the S.M., and very slowly and silently we began to back away from that grim parados. The sentry must have been half asleep, I fancy. My compass showed me we must be forty or fifty yards left of the point in the Boche line we wanted; so as soon as we were far enough back we worked slowly up right, and then a bit in again. And then we found all we'd hoped for. It was a regular redoubt the Boche was building, and he had nearly a hundred men at work, including the long string we saw carrying planks and posts. Some were just sitting round smoking. We could hear every word spoken, almost every breath. And we could see there were sixty or seventy men immediately round the redoubt.

That was good enough for me. All I wanted now was to get my men back safely. I knew "the Peacemaker" had two machine-guns trained precisely on the redoubt. All I wanted was to make sure their fire was all a shade to the left, and every bullet would tell. We should be firing fairly into the brown of 'em; because the little cross communication trench which we had watched them working in was no more than waist-deep; just a short-cut for convenience in night work only. We had 'em absolutely cold. The S.M. told me the men wanted to bomb 'em from where we were. But that was not my game at all.

With the compass bearing I had, getting back was simple. I saw the last man into our sap, and found the O.C. waiting there for me. I'd no sooner given him my news than he was at the guns. We had twenty or thirty rifles levelled on the same mark, too, and, at "the Peacemaker's" signal, they all spoke at once. Gad! it was fine to see the fire spouting from the M.G.'s mouth, and to know how its thunder must be telling.