f every day will be of interest to others. One
consolation you can have is that the more uninteresting and the fewer
my letters are the more harmless my life. If there was anything doing
I should become as verbose again as ever. However, I will try to give
you what news I have.

In the first place the weather is beautifully hot. I got up this
morning, much to my disgust, to see the Brigade Major at 9-30, and
since then I have been sitting in the large yard in the sun reading "A
Knight on Wheels," by Ian Hay, with only two interruptions--to inspect
my men, and to pull our ambulance, which had broken down, back to the
billet. It is glorious weather; you can hear the birds and the faint
hum of an aeroplane, with occasionally the noise of anti-aircraft
shells bursting round one, just a faint crump and tiny little fleecy
white clouds clustering round a black speck in the sky. It is a
perfect almost summer day. There is one point about shell fire that
may interest you. A battery of guns fires on a target, say a farm
house. The guns are a long way back, and, of course, cannot see their
target. An officer or some observer will be well forward up a big
tree, in a church steeple, or a ruined farm house, or, perhaps, in an
aeroplane, and will direct the battery. Consequently, once a battery
gets on to a point, that point alone is the dangerous one; you can
stand on a road, about 200 yards away and watch the whole show quite
safely. The other afternoon we were coming down the road and the
Bosche was shelling a point about 200 yards beyond. His shells came
over the road and always sounded to be going to drop on the road. Of
course, they never did. A shell is awfully deceptive; you see a large
black cloud of smoke arise from the ground and bits fly, while you
still hear the shell in the air, so often you try to get out of the
way of a shell that has already burst somewhere else, until you know
what happens. It is rather funny to see the explosion of a shell,
while you apparently hear the shell just going over your head. Our
mess at present, commonly known as the Anarchists, consists of those
who take and those who give life--three Trench Mortar Batteries and
one Field Ambulance. We have a very pleasant mess. Although the
Brigade is in the trenches at present we are not sleeping in the front
line. There are no dug-outs for us, and we have a lot of work to do,
so we go up every day and make emplacements and sleep in comfort at
our bil