wall is only three feet six inches high.

-------------------------------------

Arrived home about two o'clock this morning. We crawled to the place we
have to take up, and I put some men filling sandbags in the ruins and
others even digging a dugout. The enemy had "the wind up" and were using a
great number of star shells. When one goes up we all "freeze," remain
motionless, or lie still. They send them up to see across their front, and
if they locate a working party, then they start playing a tune with their
machine guns. Bullets and shells whistled through the trees all the time.
They seemed to come from all directions. The men didn't like it at all. I
wasn't altogether comfortable myself, but an officer must keep going. I
walked about and joked and laughed with them. The range-taker said, "Some
of us are getting the didley-i-dums, Sir." I don't know what that is, but
I had a feeling that I had them too.

Of course, to start with, everybody thinks every single shell and bullet
is coming straight for him. Then you find out how much space there is
around you. One man came to tell me that two men were firing at him with
his own rifle from the ruins of the alleged farmhouse, ten yards away from
the dugout we are making. Just then a field mouse squeaked, and he jumped
up in the air and said, "There's another." I told the men to fill sandbags
from the ruins; they all crowded behind this three-foot-six wall for
protection; they dug up a French needle bayonet--that was all right, but
they afterwards dug up a rifle and I noticed a suspicious smell, so I
moved them.

We came home very tired. We are attacking Hooge, a counter-attack, to take
back trenches lost in the liquid fire attack--you will hear what we did
from the papers, probably in three months' time.

-------------------------------------

I'm writing this in a new home, this time a splinter-proof dugout. The
Huns are again strafing us--last shell burst fifty yards away a few minutes
ago. Several times since I started writing I have had to shake off the
dust and debris thrown by shell bursts on to these pages. I was again
sniped at with shrapnel this morning on my machine while reconnoitering
the roads--they all missed, but they're not nice. I'm filthy, alive, and
covered with huge mosquito bites; you get sort of used to the incessant
din in time. Even the forty-two centimeter shells, which make a row like
freight trains with