The bath!  Hale, you are a most excellent fellow.  That’ll do splendidly.  Have you got my towel?...  INTERVAL....  And now, dear friends, it is another man that you see before you.  A man who has had a bath.  A man less like a bit of oily motor-waste, and more like Sir George Alexander.  This delicious coffee, too!  A bowl of it, made by Mme. Whatever-her-name-is.  I take it up in both hands and quaff it.  Here’s to You and to Home, and to Everybody—­and (just to show there’s no ill feeling) here’s to the poor old Boche!

July 29.

In the same cottage.

It’s very hot.  Ammunition lorries go by in an endless string, making the deuce of a dust.  But we are far away from guns and gun food and noise.  I got leave to go up to ——­ yesterday.

I do dislike noise so, don’t you?  The noise of a battery in action is diabolical, and the very thought of it makes me shiver.  There go the senseless lorries, all packed with music for a more hellish orchestra than you can remotely imagine.  The first few bars are enough to drive you nearly frantic.  It’s unholy.  It seems to split your head and tear your ears out of their sockets.  Can you understand a noise that hits you?  Hits unbearably, and then again.  Crashes on to you.  Bangs your bones out of your skin, till you feel dazed and sick.

Still the lorries go by.

[Illustration:  FRICOURT CEMETERY The moon and some signal lights over FRICOURT.  LA BOISELLE just over the hill.  French crosses all bent and twisted.  The little chapel still standing.]

August 3.

[Sidenote:  GUNS AT FRICOURT]

I hear the General doesn’t like Swallow, so there’s a good chance of his returning.  When you get angry with Swallow, he loses control of his legs altogether, and they all fly about in every direction.  He is quite like Rinaldo in character,—­not so perpetually fidgety, but as nervous, and more easily frightened.  Jezebel is showing her worth now like a Trojan.  She knows she has to make up for the loss of Swallow (whom I think she rather misses).  She is behaving splendidly.  She is blatantly well, and obeys all orders like clockwork; never tired; always hungry—­a model.  The other mare, Moonlight, a dark brown, seems to be somehow exhausted.  I think she has had a very hard time of it, and has been wounded in the foot.  Her foot is all right now, but she seems to have no life left in her.  The war has utterly beaten her.  Hunt is grazing and grooming and petting her all day.  So she may pick up.  At present she is somehow rather pathetic.  She was with the Indian cavalry before she got wounded.  And then she went to a veterinary hospital.  She is well made, and may possibly brighten up.  Hunt declares that she has “lost all her courage.”  I’m glad I’m not a horse.

August 5.

This is such an amazing country and in such an amazing condition.  I could collect a Harrod’s Stores in a day—­interesting and useful things, too.  But it’s impossible to carry things about.  One daren’t overload the horses, and one daren’t overload the transport.  Both are so heavy laden, as it is.