The Germans finished their little evening shoot.  We marched back very slowly in the darkness to 1910 Farm.

This farm was neither savoury nor safe.  It was built round a courtyard which consisted of a gigantic hole crammed with manure in all the stages of unpleasant putrefaction.  One side is a barn; two sides consist of stables, and the third is the house inhabited not only by us but by an incredibly filthy and stinking old woman who was continually troubling the general because some months ago a French cuirassier took one of her chickens.  The day after we arrived at this farm I had few despatches to take, so I wrote to Robert.  Here is some of the letter and bits of other letters I wrote during the following days.  They will give you an idea of our state of mind:[17]

If you want something of the dramatic—­I am writing in a farm under shrapnel fire, smoking a pipe that was broken by a shell.  For true effect I suppose I should not tell you that the shrapnel is bursting about fifty yards the other side of the house, that I am in a room lying on the floor, and consequently that, so long as they go on firing shrapnel, I am perfectly safe.

It’s the dismallest of places.  Two miles farther back the heavies are banging away over our heads.  There are a couple of batteries near the farm.  Two miles along the road the four battalions of our brigade are holding on for dear life in their trenches.

The country is open plough, with little clumps of trees, sparse hedges, and isolated cottages giving a precarious cover.  It’s all very damp and miserable, for it was raining hard last night and the day before.

I am in a little bare room with the floor covered with straw.  Two telegraph operators are making that infernal jerky clicking sound I have begun so to hate.  Half a dozen men of the signal staff are lying about the floor looking at week-old papers.  In the next room I can hear the general, seated at a table and intent on his map, talking to an officer that has just come from the firing line.  Outside the window a gun is making a fiendish row, shaking the whole house.  Occasionally there is a bit of a rattle—­that’s shrapnel bullets falling on the tiles of an outhouse.

If you came out you might probably find this exhilarating.  I have just had a talk with our mutual friend Cadell, the Signal Officer of this brigade, and we have decided that we are fed up with it.  For one thing—­after two months’ experience of shell fire the sound of a shell bursting within measurable distance makes you start and shiver for a moment—­reflex action of the nerves.  That is annoying.  We both decided we would willingly change places with you and take a turn at defending your doubtless excellently executed trenches at Liberton.

The line to the ——­[18] has just gone.  It’s almost certain death to relay it in the day-time.  Cadell and his men are discussing the chances while somebody else has started a musical-box.  A man has gone out; I wonder if he will come back.  The rest of the men have gone to sleep again.  That gun outside the window is getting on my nerves.  Well, well!