clips of live
cartridges in the sweepings of the fire place. The stampede which had
followed the first burst of fire died away in roars of laughter. No
one was hurt although pieces of cartridge cases had been shot some
distance.

While we were in these billets we experienced for the first time the
splendid system that had been organized to keep the men of the allied
armies clean. Soldiers from time immemorial have suffered from vermin
but a new cure has been discovered by some one attached to our column
which was soon used universally. The cure is gasoline. One or two
applications destroy all living creatures or their ova. Arrangements
had also been made so that the men could all have a hot bath once a
week. A factory, usually a bleachery, was commandeered and about a
hundred large tubs of hot water were provided. One after another the
various companies and units were marched to these bath houses. Every
man handed in his soiled shirt and underclothing on entering, and
received a complete clean outfit after he had performed his ablutions.
The only inconvenience attached to this system was that the underwear,
shirts and socks were pooled and they sometimes got mixed, and our
battalion being comprised chiefly of very large men sometimes had
difficulty struggling into their clean underwear.

On Saturday evening, March 6th, we went into the trenches opposite
Fromelles at La Cardonnerie Farm which had been the scene of a very
warm action in the previous November.

Before we came to Flanders we had been told a great deal about the
trenches in the Low Countries. We had seen pictures in the illustrated
papers of deep ditches in which men were packed like sardines, so deep
that we wondered how they used their rifles. After we arrived at the
front our ideas were changed, and we came to the conclusion that the
trenches we had seen depicted at home had been dug for the benefit of
photographers, and were situated in some nearby park. Certainly the
trenches in Flanders were not at all like the photographs we had seen.
In addition, the trenches described in "Our Notes from the Front" were
the trenches at the Aisne, where the country is altogether unlike the
country in Flanders. At the Aisne the soil is chalk and limestone and
the country broken and rolling. In Flanders, on the other hand, the
soil is sticky, yellow clay, and the land flat with the exception of
an occasional sand dune like an inverted pudding dish, at intervals of