Captain Shipp, now attached to a famous division awaiting embarkation, was the first to hear from him. He read Dimples’s letter twice before passing it on. It ran as follows:

Dear Brigadier-General,—You must be all of the above by this time; if not, there is favoritism somewhere and you ought to complain about it. Probably you’re wondering where I am. Well, that’s your privilege, Brig. I’m in a two-by-four village with a name as long as the Frisco System, and you’ll instantly recognize it when I tell you it has one white street and a million rats. There are no houses whatever. Further information might give aid and comfort to the enemy.

I’ve written lots of letters back home, but this is the first one of my own that I’ve had time for. I’m in the game, Brig, and I haven’t fumbled the ball. I live in a little tin shanty with a sand-bag roof, and I wear a little tin hat that holds just enough warm water to shave with. It held more—until lately; now there’s a hole in it that I wouldn’t trade for the Hudson “tube.” I was starting out with two cans of hot cocoa when the street was shelled. I spilled the boys’ cocoa and got a dent in my own, but those Bessemer derbies are certainly handy shock-absorbers. I woke up with my head in Dr. Peters’s lap.

Right here I must make you acquainted with Pete. He’s a hundred-pound hymn-weevil, and the best all-round reverend that ever snatched a brand from the burning. He dragged me in under cover all alone, and he used no hooks. Pretty good for a guy his size, eh?

Pete and I are partners in crime—and, say, the stuff we pull in this hut! Movies, theatricals, concerts, boxing-bees—with the half-portion reverend in every scrimmage. He’s a Syncopated Baptist, or an Episcopalian Elk, or something; anyhow, he’s nine parts human and one part divine. That’s the way the Y is wearing them over here. He’s got the pep, and the boys swear by him. When the war is over he hopes to get a little church somewhere, and I’m going to see that he does, if I have to buy it, for I want to hear him preach. I never have heard him, but I’ll bet he’s a bear. Take it from me, he’ll need a modest cathedral with about six acres of parking-space inside and a nail in the door for the S. R. O. sign.

We have a piano, and games, and writing-materials, and a stock of candy and tobacco and chocolate and stuff like that. I haven’t tasted a single chocolate. Fact! But it has made an old man of me. Gee! I’d give that loft building on Sixteenth Street to be alone with an order of corn-starch pudding. However, barring the fact that I haven’t lost an ounce in weight, I’m having a grand time, for there’s always something to do. Details are constantly passing through, to and from the front-line trenches, which (whisper) are so close that we can smell the Germans. That’s the reason we wear nose-bags full of chloride of lime or something. Pete and I spend our days making millions of gallons of tea and coffee and cocoa, and selling canned goods, and sewing on buttons, and cracking jokes, and playing the piano, and lugging stretchers, and making doughnuts, and getting the boys to write home to mother, and various little odd jobs; then, at night, we take supplies up to the lads in the front row of the orchestra. That’s a pretty game, by the way, for a man of my size. Nobody ever undertakes to pass me in a trench; I lie down and let them climb over. It keeps the boys good-natured, and that’s part of my job. “Hill Two Eighty-five”—that’s what they call me.

We had a caller to-day. One of the Krupp family dropped in on us and jazzed up the whole premises. There is Bull Durham and rice-papers and chocolate and raspberry jam all over this village, and one corner of our hut has gone away from here entirely. We haven’t found the stove, either, although Pete retrieved the damper, and the rest of it is probably somewhere near by.

Of course I had nothing hot for the boys when I went up to-night. It was raining, too, and cold. But they didn’t mind. They don’t mind anything—they’re wonderful that way. We all had a good laugh over it, and they pretended they were glad it was the stove and not I that got strafed. I really believe they like me. Anyhow, they made me think they do, and I was so pleased I couldn’t resist sitting down and writing you. Altogether, it was a great day and a perfect evening.