The wonder is, not that I didn't get the one post card you mention, but that you apparently have had everything I have written. Really, I do think the British postal arrangements out here are one of the most remarkable features of the war. The organisation behind our lines is quite extraordinary. Right up here in the firing line itself we get our letters and parcels every day. In the midst of a considerable bombardment I have seen fellows in artillery shelters in the line reading letters and opening parcels of little luxuries just received from home.

It's very nice of you to copy out my letters for friends at home to read. One simply can't hope to write to a number of different people, you know, because any spare time going one wants to use for sleep. I'm sorry I've omitted to tell you about some things I promised to explain, and must try to do better.

As to the time I saw into the Boche trenches while we were in for instruction, that was nothing really; due to my own stupidity, as a matter of fact, and I dare say that's why I said nothing about it. It was our second night in for instruction, and the Company we were with was sending out a small bombing patrol, so, of course, I asked if I could go too, and see what was to be seen. The O.C. of the Company very kindly let me go, and take with me Corporal Slade, of my platoon, an excellent chap, and very keen to learn. I wish he could have had a better teacher.

While close to the Boche wire our little party—only five, all told—sighted a Boche patrol quite twenty strong, and our officer in charge very properly gave the word to retire to a flank and get back to our own trench, or, rather, to a sap leading from it, so as to give warning of the Boche patrol. This was where, in my experience, I went wrong and led Slade astray. I was very curious, of course, to have a good look at the Boche patrol—the first I'd seen of the enemy in the open—and, like a fool, managed to get detached from the other three of our lot, Slade sticking close to me with a confidence I didn't deserve.

When I realised that the others were clean out of sight, and the Boche party too, I made tracks as quickly as I could—crawling, you know—as I believed for our line, cursing myself for not having a compass, a mistake you may be sure I shall not make again. Just then a regular firework display of flares went up from the Boche line, and they opened a hot burst of machine-gun fire. We lay as close as we could in the soggy grass, Slade and myself, and got no harm. Things were lively for a while, with lots of fire from both sides, and more light from both sides than was comfortable.

Later, when things had quietened down, we got on the move again, and presently, after a longish crawl through barbed wire, reached the parapet, and were just about to slide in, side by side, pretty glad to be back in the trench, when a fellow came round the traverse—we were just beside a traverse—growled something, and jabbed at Slade with his bayonet.

Bit confusing, wasn't it? Makes you think pretty quick. I suppose we realised we had struck the Boche line instead of our own in something under the twentieth part of a second, and what followed was too confused for me to remember much about. No doubt we both recognised the necessity for keeping that chap quiet in the same fraction of time that we saw we had reached the wrong trenches. I can remember the jolly feeling of my two thumbs in his throat. It was jolly, really, though I dare say it will seem beastly to you. And I suspect Slade did for the chap. We were lying on a duck-board at the bottom of the trench, and I know my little trench dagger fell and made a horrid clatter, which I made sure would bring more Boches. But it didn't.

I am sorry to say I left the little dagger there, but I collared the Boche's rifle and bayonet, thinking that was the only weapon I had, and clean forgetting the two Mills bombs in my pockets. Slade was a perfect brick and behaved all through like the man he is. We were anxious to make tracks without unnecessary delay, but, being there, thought we might as well have a look at the trench. We crept along two bays without hearing or seeing a soul. And then we heard a man struggling in deep mud and cursing in fluent German. I've thought since, perhaps, we ought to have waited for him and tried a bomb on him. But at the same time came several other different voices, and I whispered to Slade to climb out and followed him myself without wasting any time. The trench was a rotten bad one at this point, worse, I think, than any of ours. And I was thankful for it, because if it had been good those Boches would surely have been on us before we could get out. As it was, the mud held them, and the noises they made grovelling about in it prevented them from hearing our movements, though we made a good deal of noise, worrying through their wire, especially as I was dragging that Boche rifle, with bayonet fixed.

There were glimmering hints of coming daylight by the time we got into the open, which made it a bit easier to take a bearing, and also pretty necessary to have done with it quickly, because in another half-hour we should have been a target for the whole Boche line. Here again Slade was first-rate. He recognised a big shell-hole in the ground, which he had noticed was about fifty yards north of the head of a sap leading from our own line, and that guided us in to the same opening in our wire from which we had originally started. Fine chap, Slade! Three minutes later we were in our own trench, and I got a good tot of rum for both of us from the O.C. Company, who'd made up his mind he'd have to report us "Missing." So, you see, you didn't miss much by not being told all about this before, except an instance of carelessness on my part, which might have been more costly if I hadn't had a most excellent chap with me. "The Peacemaker's" going to recommend him for Lance-Sergeant's stripes, by the way, when we get out of trenches this time.

You know, that question of yours about what it is really "like" here at the front isn't nearly so easy to answer as you might suppose. You must just be patient. I'll tell you things as I learn them and see them, gradually; and, gradually, too, you must try to piece 'em together till they make some sort of picture for you. If I were a real writer I might be able to make it all clear in one go, but—well, it's not easy.

I've told you about the trenches on the way up from Ambulance Corner, the communication trenches, that is, running up at right angles to the firing line. The chief difference between the firing line and the communication trenches, of course, is that it faces the Boche front line, running roughly parallel to it, and that, say eighteen inches above the bottom of it, there is a fire-step running along its front side. When you get up on that you have a fire position: that is, you can see over the parapet, across No Man's Land, to the Boche front line, and fire a rifle.

The lines of trenches are not straight, of course. They curve about according to the nature of the ground. Running out from them on both sides towards the enemy lines there are saps, at the end of which we station listening posts at night with wired-up telephone and bell connections with the firing line. Roughly speaking, a fire trench is cut out rather like this:

with traverses every twenty or thirty paces, so as to make it impossible for an enemy on your flank to get what is called enfilade fire down and along the trench. Enfilade fire is deadly, of course. Fire from the front, on the other hand, if it falls short or overshoots the mark even by a yard lands in front of or behind your trench. You get that?

And what does it look like when one stares out from one's front trench? Well, it depends. It's always pretty queer, but it's queerest at night, when the Boche is sending up his ghostly flares, or when there's enough moonlight to make you fancy all the time you can see all manner of things. First, there's your own parapet, anything from five to five-and-twenty feet of it, sloping gradually down to the open grass of No Man's Land. That's what stops the bullets destined for your head. When Boche shells are well enough placed to blow it in, you must build it up again as soon as you can, or the bit of trench behind it will be exposed, and as your men pass to and fro there will be casualties.

Well, then, anything from ten to twenty or thirty feet beyond the lip of your trench, your wire entanglements begin, and extend, say a good thirty or forty paces out into No Man's Land. You've seen barbed-wire entanglements in pictures: row after row of stakes (some of ours are iron screw standards now, that can be set up silently) laced together across and across by barbed wire, forming an obstacle which it is particularly difficult and beastly to get through, especially at night, which, of course, is the only time you could even approach it without being blown to bits.

Here and there all through our wire are old bells, tin cans, bits of flattened tin, and oddments of that sort hanging loosely, so that when even a rat begins cavorting about in the wire at night your sentries know about it, and the Boche is neither so slim nor so agile as a rat. Say that he comes by night with bombs in his hand. One cannot throw a bomb with any accuracy of aim more than twenty or thirty yards. Boche finds himself stopped by our wire, say fifty or sixty yards from our line. If he slowly worms himself in, say twenty paces, without being heard—and he won't—and lobs a bomb at our line, imagine the hail of lead that's coming about him as he tries to wriggle his way back through the wire after shying his bomb!

But, as a matter of fact, the Boche is not good at that game. He does not shine at all at creep-in on our line. When he leaves his trenches at all he seems to prefer coming out in pretty close formation, rubbing shoulders with his pals. Our fellows are a good deal better at sculling about over the sticks than he is.

Here and there in the wire, among the tin cans and things, you can see fluttering bits of weather-worn uniform and old rags, and, at times, things more gruesome. Beyond the wire you see the strip of No Man's Land. Where we are, the average width of it is round about a hundred yards. In some places it's more, and in one place we can see, perhaps a mile off, it narrows down to much less than half that. Then begins the Boche wire, and through and across that you see the Boche front line, very much like your own, too much like your own to be very easily distinguished from it at night.

But that's a wonderful thing, that strip we call No Man's Land, running from the North Sea to Switzerland, five hundred miles. All the way along that line, day and night, without a moment's cessation, through all these long months, men's eyes have been glaring across that forsaken strip, and lead has been flying to and fro over it. To show yourself in it means death. But I have heard a lark trilling over it in the early morning as sweetly as any bird ever sang over an English meadow. A lane of death, five hundred miles long, strewn from end to end with the remains of soldiers! And to either side of it, throughout the whole of these five hundred miles, a warren of trenches, dug-outs, saps, tunnels, underground passages, inhabited, not by rabbits, but by millions of rats, it's true, and millions of hiving, busy men, with countless billions of rounds of death-dealing ammunition, and a complex organisation as closely ordered and complete as the organisation of any city in England!

It's also inhabited at this moment by one man who simply must stop scribbling, and have some grub before going on duty. This one among the millions, with the very healthy appetite, manages, in despite of all the strafing, to think quite a lot about you, and hopes you will go on thinking equally cheerily of him—your

"Temporary Gentleman."