ning shoot. We marched back very
slowly in the darkness to 1910 Farm.

This farm was neither savoury nor safe. It was built round a courtyard
which consisted of a gigantic hole crammed with manure in all the stages
of unpleasant putrefaction. One side is a barn; two sides consist of
stables, and the third is the house inhabited not only by us but by an
incredibly filthy and stinking old woman who was continually troubling
the general because some months ago a French cuirassier took one of her
chickens. The day after we arrived at this farm I had few despatches to
take, so I wrote to Robert. Here is some of the letter and bits of
other letters I wrote during the following days. They will give you an
idea of our state of mind:[17]

If you want something of the dramatic--I am writing in a farm under
shrapnel fire, smoking a pipe that was broken by a shell. For true
effect I suppose I should not tell you that the shrapnel is bursting
about fifty yards the other side of the house, that I am in a room lying
on the floor, and consequently that, so long as they go on firing
shrapnel, I am perfectly safe.

It's the dismallest of places. Two miles farther back the heavies are
banging away over our heads. There are a couple of batteries near the
farm. Two miles along the road the four battalions of our brigade are
holding on for dear life in their trenches.

The country is open plough, with little clumps of trees, sparse hedges,
and isolated cottages giving a precarious cover. It's all very damp and
miserable, for it was raining hard last night and the day before.

I am in a little bare room with the floor covered with straw. Two
telegraph operators are making that infernal jerky clicking sound I have
begun so to hate. Half a dozen men of the signal staff are lying about
the floor looking at week-old papers. In the next room I can hear the
general, seated at a table and intent on his map, talking to an officer
that has just come from the firing line. Outside the window a gun is
making a fiendish row, shaking the whole house. Occasionally there is a
bit of a rattle--that's shrapnel bullets falling on the tiles of an
outhouse.

If you came out you might probably find this exhilarating. I have just
had a talk with our mutual friend Cadell, the Signal Officer of this
brigade, and we have decided that we are fed up with it. For one
thing--after two months' experience of shell fire the sound of a shell
bursting within measurable