n gunners
had spotted me in the first position and decided that a lone man on a
motor cycle must be either an officer or despatch rider. So they tried to
get him. The shells were shrapnel and the time was calculated splendidly.
They had taken into consideration the speed of my motor cycle. Cross-roads
are particularly attended to, for there is a double chance of hitting
something, and in consequence it is always unhealthy to linger on a
crossroad.

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Dugouts are often made very comfortable with windows, tiled floors and
furniture taken from neighboring shattered chateaux. I have even seen them
with flowers growing in window-boxes over the entrance. They all have
names. Some I saw yesterday were called "Anti-Krupp Cottage," "Pleasant
View," and "Little Grey Home in the West." There was one very homey site,
well equipped and fitted, which had been dubbed the "Nut,"--the colonel
lived there.

My old corps brought an aeroplane down with a machine gun last night. They
were in a shell hole between the main and support trenches.

For the last few days I have been "up" looking for gun positions.

The lice are getting to be a torment. You have no idea how bad they are.
Everybody up here is infested with them. I have tried smearing myself with
kerosene, but that does not seem to trouble them at all. Silk underwear is
supposed to keep them down. I suppose their feet slip on the shiny
surface.

The food lately has taken on a wonderful flavor and I now know how
dissolved German tastes. The cook, instead of sending back two miles for
water to cook with, has been using water from the moat in which a Boche
had been slowly disintegrating.

To-day I was able to see what a German seventeen-inch shell could do; one
had made a crater fifty feet across and twenty feet deep in the middle of
the road. The top of the road was paved--think it over--and pieces kill at a
thousand yards. Thirty horses were buried in another hole.

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I have been given a special job by the general to enfilade a wood over the
Mound. I have my section now in the second-line trenches waiting till it
is dark before making a move. We have to make a machine-gun emplacement in
a piece of ground which is decidedly unhealthy to visit during daylight. I
have been there in daylight, but I had to creep out of it. On the map it
is called a farm, but the highest