the bald part of the head showed. It had been there a long time
and was sun-dried. Tommy used him to strike his matches on. A corpse in a
trench is quite a feature, and is looked for when the men come back again
to the same trench.

We live mostly on bully beef and hard tack. The first is corned beef and
the second is a kind of dog biscuit. We always wondered why they were so
particular about a man's teeth in the army. Now I know. It's on account of
these biscuits. The chief ingredient is, I think, cement, and they taste
that way too. To break them it is necessary to use the handle of your
entrenching tool or a stone. We have fried, baked, mashed, boiled,
toasted, roasted, poached, hashed, devilled them alone and together with
bully beef, and we have still to find a way of making them into
interesting food.

However, the Boche likes our beef. He prefers the brand canned in Chicago
to his own, and will almost sit up and beg if we throw some over to him.
The method is as follows: Throw one over ... sounds of shuffling and
getting out of the way are heard in the enemy trench. Fritz thinks it's
going to go off. Pause, and throw another. Fritz not so suspicious this
time. Keep on throwing until happy voices from enemy trenches shout,
"More! Give us more!" Then lob over as many hand grenades as you can pile
into that part of the trench and tell them to share those too.

It takes some time to distinguish whether shells are arrivals or
departures, but after a while you get into the way of telling their
direction and size by sound. Roads are constantly shelled, searching for
troops or supply columns. I was coming home to-day, up a road which ran
approximately at right angles to main fire trenches. At one place the road
was exposed for a matter of thirty or forty feet, and again farther up it
was necessary to go over the brow of a small hill. This was about three
hundred yards farther on and was exposed to the enemy's view. Thinking
they wouldn't bother about a single rider on a motor cycle, I went up past
the first exposed position. My carburetor was giving me some trouble and I
thought I would see if any rain had got into it, so I turned off the road
down a cross-road and dismounted when _crash_! a shell landed right in the
middle of the road as far up the exposed place as I was round the corner.
Then five more followed the first shell. Had I gone on I could not
possibly have missed collecting most of the fragments. The Germa