Here's an odd coincidence. The second sentence in your letter that reached me last night (with our rations of candles and coke) says: "Do tell me just what a dug-out is like." You are always asking me what something or other is "like," which forces upon me the sad conclusion that my letters are not in the least descriptive. But, "Do not shoot the pianist: he is doing his best," and if I had the pen of a readier writer you may be sure I'd use it. Yet the odd thing is, with regard to this particular command for information, I have the pen of a readier writer. You know Taffy Morgan—Billy—of our Company? Well, it seems he's quite a bit of a writer, and occasionally sends things home to his father who, is trying to keep a consecutive narrative of the doings of the Battalion. Now last night, within an hour of getting your letter, I read a thing Taffy showed me that he was sending home, all about a Company Headquarters dug-out in the line: much more decent than my scribbles. So I've asked him to let me copy some of it, and here it is pat, in answer to your question:

"'Dug-out' is the only word for it. I don't know who did the christening, but it is, like so many words and phrases adopted without question by Tommy at the front, the one proper, exact, and adequate name for the places we inhabit in the trenches. The particular dug-out I have in mind is a Company Headquarters, situated, like a good many others, in a loop trench, perhaps seventy to a hundred yards long, which curves round at a distance of twenty or thirty yards in rear of the fire-trench. The average depth of this little back-water of a trench is, say, seven feet. It was made by the French before we took over, and is very wide at the top. It has no made parapet, but is just a gaping ditch, its ragged, receding top edges eight or ten feet apart, the lower part, in which one walks, being two to three feet wide. The bottom of this ditch is duck-walked: that is to say, it has wooden gratings six feet long and eighteen inches wide laid along it. Each length of duck-walk is supported at either end by a trestle driven deep down into the mud.

"Here and there at a bend in the trench there will be a gap of several inches between duck-walks. Again one finds a place where one or two slats have been broken. These are cheerless pitfalls on a dark night, in which it is easy to sink one leg in mud or water over the knee. In places a duck-walk has canted over by losing its bearings on the trestle at one corner, giving the whole a treacherous list to one side or the other, simple enough to negotiate by day, but unpleasant for anyone hurrying along at night. Still, the trench is 'ducked' and, so far, luxurious, and a vast improvement on the sort of trench (common over the way among the Boches, I believe) in which men lose their boots, and have to be dug out themselves.

"It happens that my picture of this Company Headquarters dug-out is a three o'clock in the morning picture: moonless, and the deadest hour of the night, when Brother Boche is pretty generally silent, save for a mechanical sort of dropping rifle fire: a fire which one knows somehow, from its sound, means nothing, unless perhaps it means a certain number of German sentries sleepily proving to themselves that they are awake. In the same desultory fashion, Boche, nearly two hundred yards away across the wire entanglements and the centre strip of No Man's Land, sends up a flare of parachute light every few minutes, which, for half a minute, fills our black ditch with a queer, ghostly sort of radiance, making its dank and jagged sides to gleam again, and drawing curses from anyone feeling his way along it, even as motor lights in a country lane at home make a pedestrian curse on a dark night.

"As one gropes along this ditch one comes to narrow gaps here and there in the side farthest from the enemy. These lead to all kinds of odd necessary places: the homes of signallers, runners, and others, refuse pits, bomb and trench stores, and so on. Presently a thin streak of light shows like a white string in the blackness. This is one of the gaps, about four feet high and eighteen inches wide. A dripping waterproof sheet hangs as a curtain over this gap: the white string is the light from within escaping down one side of the sheet. Lift the sheet to one side, take two steps down and forward—the sheet dripping on your neck the while—and you are in the Company Headquarters dug-out: a hole dug out of the back of the ditch, its floor two feet below the level of the duck-boards outside, its internal dimensions ten feet by eight by six.

"At the back of this little cave, facing you as you enter—and unless you go warily you are apt to enter with a rush, landing on the earthen floor in a sitting position, what with the wet slime on your gum boots and the steps—are two bunks, one above the other, each two feet wide and made of wire netting stretched on rough stakes fastened to stout poles and covered more or less by a few empty sand-bags. One of these is the bunk of the O.C. Company, used alternatively by one of his subalterns. In the other, a Platoon Commander lies now asleep, one gum-booted leg, mud-caked well above the knee, dangling over the front edge, a goatskin coat over his shoulders, his cap jammed hard down over his eyes to shut out the light of the candle which, stayed firmly to the newspaper tablecloth by a small island of its own grease, burns as cheerily as it can in this rather draughty spot, sheltered a little from the entrance by a screen consisting of a few tins half full of condensed milk, butter, sugar, and the like. The officer in the bunk is sleeping as though dead, and the candle-light catching the mud-flecked stubble on his chin suggests that his turn in the trenches should be at least half over. Another few days should bring him to billets and shaving water."

(Here, then, in addition to the description of a dug-out, you have a portrait of your "Temporary Gentleman," rather unmercifully touched in, I thought!)

"The table—say, 30 inches by 20 inches—was made from a packing-case, and is perched on rough stake legs against the earthen side of the dug-out, with a shelf over it which was formerly a case holding two jars of rum. On the shelf are foodstuffs, Very lights, a couple of rockets, a knobkerrie, a copy of Punch, a shortbread tin full of candles, a map, an automatic pistol, and, most curiously, a dust-encrusted French cookery-book, which has taken on the qualities of an antique, and become a kind of landlord's fixture among 'trench stores' in the eyes of the ever-changing succession of company commanders who have 'taken over,' week in and week out, since the French occupation in '14.

"Hung about the sides of the dug-out are half-empty canvas packs or valises, field-glasses, a couple of periscopes, a Very pistol, two sticks caked all over with dry mud, an oilskin coat or two similarly varnished over with the all-pervading mud of the trench, a steel helmet, a couple of pairs of field boots and half a dozen pictures from illustrated papers, including one clever drawing of a grinning cat, having under it the legend, 'Smile, damn you!' The field boots are there, and not in use, because the weather is of the prevalent sort, wet, and the tenants of the place are living in what the returns call 'boots, trench, gum, thigh.' Overhead is stretched across the low roof tarred felt. Above that are rough-hewn logs, then galvanised iron and stones and earth: not shell-proof, really, but bullet- and splinter-proof, and for the most part weather-proof—at least as much so as the average coat sold under that description.

"The trench outside is very still just now, but inside the dug-out there is plenty of movement. All round about it, and above and below, the place is honeycombed by rats—brown rats with whitish bellies, big as young cats, heavy with good living; blundering, happy-go-lucky, fearless brutes, who do not bother to hunt the infinitely nimbler mice who at this moment are delicately investigating the tins of foodstuffs within a few inches of the head of the O.C. Company. The rats are variously occupied: as to a couple of them, matrons, in opposite corners of the roof, very obviously in suckling their young, who feed with awful zest; as to half a dozen others, in courting, during which process they keep up a curious kind of crooning, chirruping song wearisome to human ears; and as to the numerous remainder, in conducting a cross-country steeplechase of sorts, to and fro and round and round on the top side of the roofing felt, which their heavy bodies cause to bulge and sag till one fancies it must give way.

"There is a rough rickety stool beside the table. On this is seated the O.C. Company, his arms outspread on the little ledge of a table, his head on his arms, his face resting on the pages of an open Army Book 153, in which, half an hour ago, he wrote his morning situation report, in order that his signallers might inform Battalion Headquarters, nearly a mile away down the communication trench to the rear, with sundry details, that there was nothing doing beyond the normal intermittent strafing of a quiet night. The O.C. Company is asleep. A mouse is clearing its whiskers of condensed milk within two inches of his left ear, and the candle is guttering within two inches of his cap-peak. During the past few days he has had four or five such sleeps as this, half an hour or so at a time, and no more, for there has been work toward in the line, involving exposure for men on the parapet and so forth, of a sort which does not make for restfulness among O.C. Companies.

"There comes a quiet sound of footfalls on the greasy duck-boards outside. Two mice on the table sit bolt upright to listen. The cross-country meeting overhead is temporarily suspended. The O.C. Company's oilskin-covered shoulders twitch nervously. The mother rats continue noisily suckling their young, though one warily pokes its sharp nose out over the edge of the felt, sniffing, inquiringly. Then the waterproof sheet is drawn aside, and the O.C. Company sits up with a jerk. A signaller on whose leather jerkin the raindrops glisten in the flickering candle-light thrusts head and shoulders into the dug-out.

"'Message from the Adjutant, sir!'

"The O.C. reads the two-line message, initials the top copy for return to the signaller, spikes the carbon copy on a nail overhead, where many others hang, glances at his wrist-watch, and says wearily:

"'Well, what are the signallers strafing about, anyhow? It's ten minutes before time now. Here you are!'

"He tears two written pages from the Army message book which was his pillow, signs them, and hands them up to the signaller.

"'Call the Sergeant-Major on your way back, and tell him I've gone down to the sap-head. He can bring the wiring party along right away. It's nearly three o'clock. Send a runner to tell the officer on duty I'm going out myself with this party. You might just remind the Sergeant-Major I want two stretcher-bearers at the sap-head. Tell 'em to keep out of sight till the others are out over the parapet. Right! Messages will go to Mr. ——, of course, while I'm out.'

"Brother Boche may remain quiet. Three o'clock is a good quiet time. And there is no moon. But, Brother Boche being dead quiet just now, may conceivably have patrols out there in No Man's Land. They may carry valuable information quickly to his line, and two or three machine-guns may presently open up on the O.C. Company and his wiring party, who, again, may be exposed by means of flare lights from the other side. One hopes not. Meanwhile, after a glance round, the O.C. picks up his mud-caked leather mitts, settles the revolver pouch on his belt, blows out the guttering candle, feels his way out past the dripping waterproof sheet into the black trench, and leaves the dug-out to his sleeping brother officer (who was on deck from 10 to 1, and will be out again an hour before dawn) and the rats.

"Theoretically, this O.C. Company may be himself as much in need of sleep as anyone in the trench. Actually, however, apart from his needs, he is personally responsible for whatever may happen in quite a long stretch of dark, mysterious trench: of trench which in one moment may be converted by the ingenious Boche into a raging hell of paralysing gas and smoke, of lurid flame and rending explosion. German officers seated in artillery dug-outs a mile or so away across the far side of No Man's Land may bring about that transformation in one moment. They did it less than a week ago, though, by reason of unceasing watchfulness on this side, it availed them nothing. They may be just about to do it now, and, unlike the average of German O.C. Companies, our officers never ask their men to face any kind of danger which they themselves do not face with them. And so, for this particular O.C. Company, the interior of that queer little dug-out (where the men's rum stands in jars under the lower bunk, and letters from home are scanned, maps pored over, and reports and returns made out) does not exactly bring unmixed repose. But the rats love it."

So there you are! By the judicious picking of Taffy's brains I have been enabled to present you with a much better picture of a dug-out than my own unaided pen could give. Reading over, there seems something melancholy and sombre about it; I don't know why. It's a jolly little dug-out, and Taffy's a thundering fine officer; nothing in the least melancholy about him. Then why—? Oh, well, I guess it's his Celtic blood. Maybe he's got a temperament. I must tell him so. By the way, that wiring job he mentions came off all right; a nasty exposed place, but "the Peacemaker" got his party through without a single casualty, or, as the men always say, "Casuality."

Taffy writes a much better letter, doesn't he? than your

"Temporary Gentleman."