he dugouts were really pretty safe. Of course there were
dangers--where are there not along that strip of land that runs from
the North Sea to Switzerland in France and Belgium?

"A direct hit from a big enough shell would bury us all," he said.
"But that's not likely--the chances are all against it. And, even
then, we'd have a chance. I've seen men dug out alive from a hole
like this after a shell from one of their biggest howitzers had
landed square upon it."

But I had no anxiety to form part of an experiment to prove the truth
or the falsity of that suggestion! I was glad to know that the
chances of a shell's coming along were pretty slim.

Conditions were primitive at that mess. The refinements of life were
lacking, to be sure--but who cared? Certainly the hungry members of
the Reverend Harry Lauder, M.P., Tour did not! We ate from a rough
deal table, sitting on rude benches that had a decidedly home-made
look. But--we had music with our meals, just like the folks in London
at the Savoy or in New York at Sherry's! It was the incessant thunder
of the guns that served as the musical accompaniment of our lunch,
and I was already growing to love that music. I could begin, now, to
distinguish degrees of sound and modulations of all sorts in the
mighty diapason of the cannon. It was as if a conductor were leading
an orchestra, and as if it responded instantly to every suggestion of
his baton.

There was not much variety to the food, but there was plenty of it,
and it was good. There was bully beef, of course; that is the real
staff of life for the British army. And there were potatoes, in
plentiful supply, and bread and butter, and tea--there is always tea
where Tommy or his officers are about! There was a lack of table
ware; a dainty soul might not have liked the thought of spreading his
butter on his bread with his thumb, as we had to do. But I was too
hungry to be fastidious, myself.

Because the mess had guests there was a special dish in our honor.
One of the men had gone over--at considerable risk of his life, as I
learned later--to the heap of stones and dust that had once been the
village of Givenchy. There he had found a lot of gooseberries. The
French call them grossets, as we in Scotland do, too--although the
pronunciation of the word is different in the two languages, of
course. There had been gardens around the houses of Givenchy once,
before the place had been made into a desert of rubble and brickdus