I feel as if I had been out here for years, and it seems quite odd to think that one used to wear evening dress and have a fire in one’s room.  I am promising myself, if all goes well, to get home about Christmas-time.  I wish I could think that the war would be over by then, but it doesn’t look very like it.

Remember me to Gwennie, and to all your people.  Take care of your old self.

Yours truly,
S. MACNAUGHTAN.

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1 December.—­Mrs. Knocker and Miss Chisholm and Lady Dorothy went out to Pervyse a few days ago to make soup, etc., for Belgians in the trenches.  They live in the cellar of a house which has been blown inside out by guns, and take out buckets of soup to men on outpost duty.  Not a glimpse of fire is allowed on the outposts.  Fortunately the weather has been milder lately, but soaking wet.  Our three ladies walk about the trenches at night, and I come home at 1 a.m. from the station.  The men of our party meanwhile do some house-work.  They sit over the fire a good deal, clear away the tea-things, and when we come home at night we find they have put hot-water bottles in our beds and trimmed some lamps.  I feel like Alice in Wonderland or some other upside-down world.  We live in much discomfort, which is a little unnecessary; but no one seems to want to undertake housekeeping.

I make soup all day, and there is not much else to write about.  All along the Yser the Allies and the Germans confront each other, but things have been quieter lately.  The piteous list of casualties is not so long as it has been.  A wounded German was brought in to-day.  Both his legs were broken and his feet frost-bitten.  He had been for four days in water with nothing to eat, and his legs unset.  He is doing well.

[Page Heading:  PERVYSE]

On Sunday I drove out to Pervyse with a kind friend, Mr. Tapp.  At the end of the long avenue by which one approaches the village, Pervyse church stands, like a sentinel with both eyes shot out.  Nothing is left but a blind stare.  Hardly any of the church remains, and the churchyard is as if some devil had stalked through it, tearing up crosses and kicking down graves.  Even the dead are not left undisturbed in this awful war.  The village (like many other villages) is just a mass of gaping ruins—­roofs blown off, streets full of holes, not a window left unshattered, and the guns still booming.

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To Mrs. Charles Percival.

FURNES, BELGIUM,
5 December.

DARLING TAB,

I have a chance of sending this to England to be posted, so I must send you a line to wish you many happy returns of the day.  I wish we could have our yearly kiss.  I will think of you a lot, my dear, on the 8th, and drink your health if I can raise the wherewithal.  We are not famous for our comforts, and it would amaze you to see how very nasty food can be, and how very little one can get of it.