The scabbard I am using was resting in a loft of a deserted brewery. I am now complete with rifle, bayonet, and scabbard. Sometimes you see a man smashed about in a terrible way, such a mess that you think he is a goner; he may recover. Another man may have just a small wound and will die. A bullet hitting a man in the head will smash it as effectually as a sledge-hammer. Once a man leaves your unit, wounded, you don't see him again. You get a fresh draft.

No one thinks of peace here. Germany must be put in a similar state to Belgium first.

We never travel anywhere without our smoke helmets; they come right over our heads and are tucked into our shirts; they have two glass eye-pieces. When we have them on we look like the old Spanish gentleman who ran the "Star Chamber." Helmets must always be ready to put on instantly. Gas is a matter of seconds in coming over. The helmets are better than respirators, but have to be constantly in

spected. A small hole, or if one is allowed to dry, means a casualty.

Storm brewing. Flies bad, driven in by the wind. Nature goes on just the same. I suppose that this farm would be just as flyridden in an ordinary summer. During the bombarding yesterday I noticed swallows flying about quite unconcerned. Corn, mostly self-planted, grows right up to the trenches. Cabbages grow wild. Communicating trenches run right through fields of crops; flowers grow in profusion between the lines, big red poppies and field daisies, and there are often hundreds of little frogs in the bottom of the trenches.

A trip to No Man's Land is an excursion which you never forget. It varies in width and horrors. My impression was similar to what I should feel being on Broadway without any clothes-a naked feeling. Fortyseven and one half inches of earth are necessary to stop a bullet, and it's nice to have that amount of dirt between you and the enemy's

bullets. The dead lie out in between the lines or hang up on the wire; they don't look pretty after they have been out some time. It's a pleasant job to have to get their identification disks, and we have to search the bodies of the enemy dead for papers and even buttons so that we can know what unit is in front of us. Flowers grow in between, butterflies play together, and birds nest in the wire. When the grass becomes too high it has to be cut, because otherwise it would prevent good observation. In some places grass does n't have a chance to even take root, let alone grow. The shells take care of that.

I managed to get a translation of a diary kept by a German soldier who fell on the field. Below is an exact translation and gives the point of view of a man in the trenches on the other side of the line. He was writing his diary at the same time I was writing mine, and we were both fighting around the salient at Ypres, Hooge being on the point of the salient farthest east. This part, which was