affirmatively.

"It's called the _Daily Woollen Undershirt_," he said. "Haven't you seen
everybody sitting along the roadside reading theirs and trying to keep
up with things? Believe me, it's some reading-matter, too."

"Don't let him kid you," said the section chief, "I haven't had to read
mine yet. The doctor fixed up the baths in town and yesterday he passed
around those flea charms. Have you seen them?"

For our joint inspection there was passed the string necklace with two
linen tabs soaked in aromatic oil of cedar, while the section chief
gave an impromptu lecture on personal sanitation. It was concluded by a
peremptory order from without for extinction of all lights. The candle
stuck on the helmet top was snuffed and we lay down in darkness with the
guns booming away on either side.

* * * * *

Our positions were located in a country almost as new to war as were the
fields of Flanders in the fall of '14. A little over a month before it
had all been peaceful farming land, far behind the belligerent lines.
Upon our arrival, its sprouting fields of late wheat and oats were
untended and bearing their first harvest of shell craters.

The abandoned villages now occupied by troops told once more the mute
tales of the homeless. The villagers, old men, old women and children,
had fled, driving before them their cows and farm animals even as they
themselves had been driven back by the train of German shells. In their
deserted cottages remained the fresh traces of their departure and the
ruthless rupturing of home ties, generations old.

On every hand were evidences of the reborn war of semi-movement. One day
I would see a battery of light guns swing into position by a roadside,
see an observing officer mount by ladder to a tree top and direct the
firing of numberless rounds into the rumbling east. By the next morning,
they would have changed position, rumbled off to other parts, leaving
beside the road only the marks of their cannon wheels and mounds of
empty shell cases.

Between our infantry lines and those of the German, there was yet to
grow the complete web of woven wire entanglements that marred the
landscapes on the long established fronts. Still standing, silent
sentinels over some of our front line positions were trees, church
steeples, dwellings and barns that as yet had not been levelled to the
ground. Dugouts had begun to show their entrances in the surface of the
groun