e looked very, very carefully,
but only found empties. My batman has made me comfortable. I'm writing
this on a washstand; in front of me I have a bunch of roses in a broken
vase. My trench coat is hanging on a nail from a coat-hanger. A large
piece of broken wardrobe mirror has been nailed up to a beam for my use.
One of the men just came in to ask if a trousers press would be of any
use. We have a fine little bureau cupboard of carved oak; we use this for
the rations. A pump, repaired with the leather from a German helmet, has
been persuaded to work and has been busy ever since. The roof of my cellar
is arched brick and has a few tons of fallen debris on the floor upstairs.
That strengthens it. It is shored up from inside with rafters. This makes
the roof shell-proof, except for big shells, and the enemy always use big
shells. The cellar floors are concrete.

It is very strange the lightness with which serious things are taken by
men here, and it took me some time to understand it. I met a young captain
of the Royal Marine Artillery who was in charge of a battery of trench
mortars. He was telling me of how one of his mortars and the crew were
wiped out by a direct hit. He referred to it as though he had just missed
his train.

Two days later I went up with the Machine-Gun Officer of the Second
Gordons to look at a piece of ground. To get there we had to crawl on our
hands and knees. In one part of our journey we came to a sunken road. The
day was fine, so we lay there. He asked me about Canada. He wanted to know
something about the settler's grant. He said: "Of course you know after a
chap has been out here in the open, it will be impossible to go back again
to office life." I boosted Canada and suddenly the irony of the situation
occurred to me. Here we were lying down in a road quite close to the
German lines, so close that it would be suicide to even stand up, and yet
here we were calmly discussing the merits of Canadian emigration. I
commented on this and he replied: "My dear fellow, when you have been out
as long as I have, you will come to realize that being at the front is a
period of intense boredom punctuated by periods of intense fear, and that
if you allow yourself to be carried away by depression it will be your
finish." He had been out since just after Mons.

I remembered this and I found that the nonchalant and care-free attitude
of the average British officer was really a mask and simulated to keep his