I have a vast respect for HINDENBURG (a man who can drink the mixtures he does, and still sit up and smile sunnily into the jaws of a camera ten times a day, is worthy of anybody’s veneration) but if he thought that by blowing these poor little French villages into small smithereens he would deprive the B.E.F. of headcover and cause it to catch cold and trot home to mother, he will have to sit up late and do some more thinking.  For Atkins of to-day is a knowing bird; he can make a little go the whole distance and conjure plenty out of nothingness.  As for cover, two bricks and his shrapnel hat make a very passable pavilion.  Goodness knows it would puzzle a guinea-pig to render itself inconspicuous in our village, yet I have watched battalion after battalion march into it and be halted and dismissed.  Half an hour later there is not a soul to be seen.  They have all gone to ground.  My groom and countryman went in search of wherewithal to build a shelter for the horses.  He saw a respectable plank sticking out of a heap of debris, laid hold on it and pulled.  Then—­to quote him verbatim—­“there came a great roarin’ from in undernath of it, Sor, an’ a black divil of an infantryman shoved his head up through the bricks an’ drew down sivin curses on me for pullin’ the roof off his house.  Then he’s afther throwin’ a bomb at me, Sor, so I came away.  Ye wouldn’t be knowin’ where to put your fut down in this place, Sor, for the dhread of treadin’ in the belly of an officer an’ him aslape.”

Some people have the bungalow mania and build them bijoux maisonettes out of biscuit tins, sacking and what-not, but the majority go to ground.  I am one of the majority; I go to ground like a badger, for experience has taught me that a dug-out—­cramped, damp, dark though it maybe—­cannot be stolen from you while you sleep; that is to say, thieves cannot come along in the middle of the night, dig it up bodily by the roots and cart it away in a G.S. waggon without you, the occupant, being aware that some irregularity is occurring to the home.  On the other hand, in this country, where the warrior, when he falls on sleep suffers a sort of temporary death, bungalows can be easily purloined from round about him without his knowledge; and what is more, frequently are.

For instance, a certain bungalow in our village was stolen as frequently as three times in one night.  This was the way of it.  One Todd, a foot-slogging Lieutenant, foot-slogged into our midst one day, borrowed a hole from a local rabbit, and took up his residence therein.  Now this mud-pushing Todd had a cousin in the same division, one of those highly trained specialists who trickles about the country shedding coils of barbed wire and calling them “dumps”—­a sapper, in short.  One afternoon the sapping Todd, finding some old sheets of corrugated iron that he had neglected to dump, sent them over to his gravel-grinding cousin with his love and the request of a loan of a