the advertisements on them and are driven by
the bus-drivers themselves. Three hundred came over with their own
machines. They are now soldiers. The observation balloon I mentioned
yesterday was shelled down to-day.

I am writing this in an old Flemish farmhouse, and the room I'm sitting in
has a carved rafter ceiling, red brick floor and nasty purple cabbage
wallpaper. All the men of the house with the exception of the old man are
at the war; one son has already died. The Germans have been through here.
They tied the mayor of the town to a tree and shot him. The trenches have
been filled in, all the wreckage cleared, and they have a new mayor.

-------------------------------------

It is not yet 7 A.M. I am an orderly officer and have to take the men out
for a run at six. I came back and bought a London "Daily Mail" of
yesterday from a country-woman. We are at least three miles from the town,
but they are enterprising enough to bring papers to us at this time in the
morning. A "Daily Mail" costs four cents.

Since I last wrote I have been up to the front line. Everything is
different from what you imagine. The German trenches are easily
distinguished through glasses; their sand-bags are multi-colored. Shrapnel
was bursting over ruins of an old town in their lines. When you look
through a periscope at the wilderness, it is difficult to imagine that
thousands of soldiers on both sides have burrowed themselves into the
earth. The evidence of their alertness is shown by their snipers, who are
always busy whenever the target is up.

A battery of eight-inch howitzers was opening fire. Our battery commander,
hearing this, sent us up. The guns, big fellows, were well concealed. They
were painted in protective colors and covered with screens of branches to
prevent aerial observation. In the grounds all over the place were
dug-outs, deep rabbit burrows, ten or twelve feet down, into which
everybody went immediately. The Germans started their "hate." The firing
is done by hand cord; other big guns are fired electrically. An enormous
flash, an ear-splitting crash, a great sheet of flame from the muzzle, and
two hundred pounds of steel is sent tearing through the air to the
"Kultur" exponents. The whole gun lifts off the ground and runs back on
its oil-compression springs. These guns are moved by their own caterpillar
tractors which are kept somewhere close by. In three quarters of an hour
they can get them