’I’m looking out now due east.  There’s a tangled mass of trenches not far off, where there’s been some hot raiding lately.  I see an engineer officer with a fatigue party working away at them—­he’s showing the men how to lay down a new trench with tapes and pegs.  Just to my left some men are filling up a crater.  Then there’s a lorry full of bits of an old corduroy road they’re going to lay down somewhere over a marshy place.  There are two sausage balloons sitting up aloft, and some aeroplanes coming and going.  Our front line is not more than a mile away, and the German line is about a mile and a quarter.  Far off to my right I can just see a field with tanks in it.  Ah—­there goes a shell on the Hun line—­another!  Can’t think why we’re tuning up at this time of day.  We shall be getting some of their heavy stuff over directly, if we don’t look out.  It’s rot!

’And the sun is shining like blazes on it all.  As I came up I saw some of our men resting on the grass by the wayside.  They were going up to the trenches—­but it was too early—­the sun was too high—­they don’t send them in till dusk.  Awfully good fellows they looked!  And I passed a company of Bantams, little Welsh chaps, as fit as mustard.  Also a poor mad woman, with a basket of cakes and chocolate.  She used to live in the village where I’m sitting now—­on a few bricks of it, I mean.  Then her farm was shelled to bits and her old husband and her daughter killed.  And nothing will persuade her to go.  Our people have moved her away several times—­but she always comes back—­and now they let her alone.  Our soldiers indeed are awfully good to her, and she looks after the graves in the little cemetery.  But when you speak to her, she never seems to understand, and her eyes—­well, they haunt one.

’I’m beginning to get quite used to the life—­and lately I have been doing some observation work with an F.O.O. (that means Forward Observation Officer), which is awfully exciting.  Your business on these occasions is to get as close to the Germans as you can, without being seen, and you take a telephonist with you to send back word to the guns, and, by Jove, we do get close sometimes!

’Well, dear old Pam, there’s my engineer coming across the fields, and I must shut up.  Mind—­if I don’t come back to you—­you’re just to think, as I told you before, that it’s all right.  Nothing matters—­nothing—­but seeing this thing through.  Any day we may be in the thick of such a fight as I suppose was never seen in the world before.  Or any night—­hard luck! one may be killed in a beastly little raid that nobody will ever hear of again.  But anyway it’s all one.  It’s worth it.

’Your letters don’t sound to me as though you were particularly enjoying life.  Why don’t you ever give me news of