You'll be grieved to hear that cheery, indomitable little Tommy Dodd was rather badly laid out this morning; four or five nasty wounds from shrapnel. But I think he'll pull through. He has so much of the will to live, and I am sure a soul so uniformly cheerful as his must make its body easier to heal.

I wasn't six paces from him at the time. We were fastening some barbed-wire stays on screw standards we meant to put out to-night. I had just lent him my thick leather gloves after showing him exactly how I wanted these stays fixed, with little stakes bound on at the end of them, so as to save time to-night when we are over the parapet. He was busy as a beaver, as he generally is; a bit nearer to Whizz-bang Corner than was quite wise—I shall always reproach myself for not keeping him farther from that ill-omened spot—when the shell burst low overhead. I got a dozen tiny flicks myself on hands and head, which the M.O. touched up with iodine after he bandaged Tommy Dodd. But Tommy was badly hit in the thigh, one arm, and the left shoulder.

He was parchment-colour by the time I got the stretcher-bearers along, and that was only a matter of seconds. We were close to their little dug-out, as it happened. He'd lost a lot of blood. But he grinned at me, with a kind of twist in his grin, as I helped lift him into the trench stretcher.

"Looks almost like a Blighty for me, sir, don't it? Well, even the Boche must hit something sometimes. It's only an outer this time, an' look at the thousands o' rounds when he don't get on the target at all! Sorry I couldn't 've finished them stays, sir. If you send for Davis, o' Number 5 Section, you'll find him pretty good at it, sir." And then he turned to the stretcher-bearer in front, who had the strap over his shoulder, and was just bracing himself to start off when he'd done talking. "Home, John!" he says, with a little kick up of his head, which I really can't describe. "An' be sure you don't exceed the limit, for I can't abide them nasty low perlice courts an gettin' fined."

And yet, when we got down to Battalion Headquarters, the M.O. told me Tommy Dodd ought by all rights to have been insensible, from the blood he'd lost and the shock of those wounds: not surface wounds, you know. He'll have two or three months of hospital comfort now. I hope to goodness nothing septic will intervene. The Battalion would be the poorer for it if we lost Tommy. The M.O. says he'll pull through. The M.O. cropped little patches of hair off round my head, to rub the iodine in where I was scratched, so I look as if I had ringworm.

But to get back to business. I've got to "jot down" this everyday trench routine for you, haven't I? And I only got as far as breakfast in yesterday's letter. We'll get a move on and run through it now. I'm due on deck directly after lunch to relieve Taffy; and it's past eleven now.

After breakfast one-half the men kip down for a sleep, and the other half turn to for work. Then after the mid-day dinner, the half that rested in the forenoon, work; and throughout the night all hands stand their turn at sentry-go. That's the principle—in our Company, anyhow. But, of course, it doesn't always work out quite like that. Everything naturally gives way to strafing considerations, and at times urgent repairing work makes it necessary to forgo half or all the day rest-time. As for the officers—there are only three of us now, besides "the Peacemaker"—one officer is always on duty, day and night. We take that in three-hour spells, the three of us. Then in the day-time, while the turn of duty is a fixed thing, we are, as a matter of fact, about at some job or another all the time; just as the O.C. Company is about all the twenty-four hours. At night we three do take our time off for sleep after a tour of duty, unless in some emergency or other. "The Peacemaker" just gets odd cat-naps when he can.

You might think that if there'd been no particular artillery strafing going on there would be no necessary repair work for the men to do in the trench. But you see, we've practically always got a new dug-out in course of construction, and a refuse pit to be dug, and a sniping shelter to be made, and a new bit of trench to be cut. We have nine separate sumps where pumps are fixed in our line. And if those pumps were not well worked each day we'd soon be flooded out. There's generally some wire and standards to be got ready for putting out at night, with a few "Gooseberries" and trip wires where our entanglements have been weakened by shell fire. I've never yet seen a trench that wasn't crying out for some sort of work on it.

At breakfast "the Peacemaker" will generally talk over the jobs he specially wants us to put through during the day, and give us any notes he may have taken during the night, round the trenches. Then chits begin coming in by 'phone from Battalion Headquarters; and chits, however short and innocent they may look, nearly always boil down to a job of work to be done. In fact, one way and another, jobs invariably invade the breakfast table and every other meal-time; and before the tea-mugs are filled up a second time one nearly always hears a batman told to "clear this end, will you, to make room for me to write a chit."

Then there will be a visitor, probably the C.O., pretty soon after breakfast, and "the Peacemaker" will trot round our line with him, discussing. Ten to one that visit will mean more jobs of work; and, occasionally, what's a deal more welcome, a new plan for a little strafe of some sort.

And then one sees the ration parties trailing up again from the rear, and dinner has arrived; some kind of a stew, you know, as a rule, with bully as alternative; potatoes if you're lucky, jam anyhow, more tea, and some sort of pickings from home parcels in the way of cake or biscuits, figs or what not. During and immediately after dinner—in the dug-out we call it lunch, from habit, but it's about the same thing as the evening meal, as a rule—we always plan out the night's work, patrols, wiring, any little strafe we have on, and that sort of thing.

We are a bit luxurious in "A" Company, and generally run to a mug of afternoon tea; sometimes (if the recent mails have been heavy) to an outburst of plum cake or shortbread with it. And an hour before dark comes evening Stand-to. Technically, this has some tactical significance, even as the morning Stand-to has actually. But as a matter of fact, in the evening it's a parade, more than anything else, to inspect rifles, check up ammunition, call the roll, and see the men are all right.

By the way, you asked me something about the rum. I don't think it's issued at all in the summer months. What we issue now, once a day, is, I think, one gill per man of the half-and-half mixture of rum and water. I think it's a gill; a pint mug has to supply eight men. I think, on the whole, it's a useful issue, and can't possibly do any harm. It's thundering good rum; good, honest, mellow stuff, and very warming.

About seven o'clock we generally have a feed, from habit, you know, that being the time we used to have dinner in camp in England. It's the same sort of feed we have in middle day. And after that, the officer who is going on duty at midnight, say, will generally get a sleep. The usual round of night work is well under way by now—patrols, wiring parties, work on the parapet, and so on, according to what the moon allows. If there's too much light, these things have to come later.

With regard to work for sentry reliefs, the way we have in our Company is this: a sentry's relief—the sentries are always double by night and single by day—must always be within call of the sentry; therefore we never let him go beyond the bay next to the one the sentry occupies, that is, round the next traverse. Well, we hold the reliefs responsible for keeping those two bays in good order; clean and pumped, sides revetted, fire-step clear and in repair, the duck-boards lifted and muck cleared out from under them each day, and so forth. All used cartridges have to be gathered up and put in the sand-bag hung over the fire-step for that purpose, for return to store.

Unless there is real strafing going on the trenches grow pretty silent after midnight. At least, it seems so to the officer on duty as he makes his way from one end of his line to the other. One gets very tired then. There's never any place where you can sit down in a trench. I am sure the O.C. Company is often actually on his feet for twenty-two out of the twenty-four hours. I say it's very quiet. Well, it's a matter of comparison, of course. If in the middle of the street at two o'clock in the morning at home you heard a few rifles fired, you would think it remarkably noisy. But here, if there's nothing going on except rifle fire, say at the rate of a couple of shots a minute, the trenches seem extraordinarily quiet; ghostly quiet.

You go padding along in your gum boots, feeling your way with your stick, which usually carries such a thick coat of mud on it that its taps on the duck-boards are hardly audible. You come round the corner of a traverse, and spot a sentry's helmet against the sky-line. "Who goes there?" he challenges you, hoarsely, and you answer, "Lieutenant So-and-so, —— Regiment," and he gives you leave to pass.

One has to be careful about these challenges. At first the men were inclined to be casual and grunt out, "Tha's all right!" or just the name of the Regiment when challenged. One had to correct that tendency. It is easy for a Boche to learn to say "Tha's all right," or to mention the name of a Regiment opposite his line. Plenty of them have been waiters, barbers, clerks, bakers, and so on in London. So we insist on formal correctness in these challenges, and the officer or man who doesn't halt promptly on being challenged takes his chance of a bullet or a bayonet in his chest.

One stops for a word or two with every sentry, and one creeps out along the saps for a word with the listening posts. It helps them through their time, and it satisfies you that they're on the spot, mentally as well as physically. There's hardly a man in "A" Company who is not an inveterate smoker, but, do you know, I have never once got a whiff of 'baccy smoke in the neighbourhood of a sentry since we've been in trenches, never a suspicion of it! Neither have I ever found a sentry who was not genuinely watching to his front; and if the Colonel himself comes along and asks one a question there's not one of them ever betrayed into turning his eyes from his front. They're good lads.

And so the small hours lengthen into the rather larger ones, and morning Stand-to comes round again. It isn't often it's so absolutely uneventful as my jottings on the subject, of course. But you must just regard this as the merest skeleton outline of the average routine of trench days. And then, to be sure, I've left out lots of little things. Also, every day brings its special happenings, and big or little strafes. One thing we do not get in trenches, and I cannot believe we ever should, from what I've seen of it; and that is monotony, boredom, idleness, lack of occupation. That's a fancy of the newspaper writers which, so far as I know, has literally no relation whatever to the facts of trench life on the British Front in France; certainly not to anything as yet seen by your

"Temporary Gentleman."