One March afternoon, a few days later, the following letter reached Pamela, who was still with her sister.  It was addressed in Desmond Mannering’s large and boyish handwriting.

     ’B.E.F., March.

’MY DEAR PAMELA—­I am kicking my heels here at an engineer’s store, waiting for an engineer officer who is wanted to plan some new dug-outs for our battery, and as there is no one to talk to inside except the most inarticulate Hielander I ever struck, I shall at last make use of one of your little oddments, my dear, which are mostly too good to use out here—­and write you a letter on a brand new pocket-pad, with a brand new stylo.

’I expect you know from Arthur about where we are.  It’s a pretty nasty bit of the line.  The snipers here are the cleverest beasts out.  There isn’t a night they don’t get some of us, though our fellows are as sharp as needles too.  I went over a sniping school last week with a jolly fellow who used to hunt lions in Africa.  My hat!—­we have learnt a thing or two from the Huns since we started.  But you have to keep a steady look-out, I can tell you.  There was a man here last night in a sniper’s post, shooting through a trench loophole, you understand, which had an iron panel.  Well, he actually went to sleep with his rifle in his hand, having had a dog’s life for two or three nights.  But for a mercy, he had pulled down his panel—­didn’t know he had!—­and the next thing he knew was a bullet spattering on it—­just where his eye should have been.  He was jolly quick in backing out and into a dug-out, and an hour later he got the man.

’But there was an awful thing here last night.  An officer was directing one of our snipers—­stooping down just behind him, when a Hun got him—­right in the eyes.  I was down at the dressing-station visiting one of our men who had been knocked over—­and I saw him led in.  He was quite blind,—­and as calm as anything—­telling people what to do, and dictating a post card to the padre, who was much more cut up than he was.  I can tell you, Pamela, our Army is fine!  Well, thank God, I’m in it—­and not a year too late.  That’s what I keep saying to myself.  And the great show can’t be far off now.  I wouldn’t miss it for anything, so I don’t give the Hun any more chances of knocking me over than I can help.

’You always want to know what things look like, old Pam, so I’ll try and tell you.  In the first place, it’s just a glorious spring day.  At the back of the cranky bit of a ruined farm where we have our diggings (by the way, you may always go back at night and find half your bedroom shot away—­that happened to me the other night—­there was a tunic of mine still hanging on the door, and when you opened the door, nothing but a hole ten feet deep full of rubble—­jolly luck, it didn’t happen at night-time!) there are actually some lilac trees, and the buds on them are quite big.  And somehow or other the birds