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In digging new trenches and new dugouts, bodies and bits of bodies were unearthed, and put into sand-bags with the soil that was sent back down a line of men concealing their work from German eyes waiting for any new activity in our ditches. "Bit of Bill," said the leading man, putting in a leg. "Another bit of Bill," he said, unearthing a hand.

But although they were solidly built they had not been proof against the rain of high explosives. Many of them were in ruins, the logs splintered like kindling wood and strewn far and wide over the ground. We found several dugouts, evidently officers' quarters, which were almost luxuriously furnished.

They have made themselves at home in their new camping life behind the lines of dugouts and caves; they have become gnomes, woodsmen, cavemen, taking on the earth colors of the primitive world to which they have been forced to return in order to free the soil of their country.

An ample number of bomb-proofs and dugouts have been constructed, and at night over all the windows are tacked thick black curtains. For they know the Germans. La Panne is the last town on the Belgian littoral before you reach the French frontier and the last villa in the town is occupied by the King and Queen. It stands amid the sand-dunes, looking out across the Channel toward England.

Sir Alexander Mackenzie traveled in a big birch-bark when he was here ten men in her, and three thousand pounds of cargo besides. She was twenty-five feet long. Uncle Dick told me the Indians have dugouts farther down the river, but not very good ones.

Those who had formerly eked out a precarious enough existence in dugouts, now lived in palaces, had their raiment fashioned by hands Parisian, and gave receptions on a scale of such grandeur that the flowers offered as souvenirs thereat would have kept many a wolf from a dugout door for years, and a few Wise Men it was said lost their heads in the mad whirl of speculation, but as that often happens in the building up of any great city, not necessarily in the West, it was not so surprising as it might have been.

On the left Mouquet Farm, which, with its unsurpassed dugouts and warrens surrounded by isolated machine gun posts, had repulsed previous attacks, could not resist the determined onslaught which will share glory, when history is written, with the storming of Courcelette.

A few minutes later British tanks were rumbling along over "No Man's Land" flanked and followed by the infantry. The tanks smashed down the barbed wire entanglements and were atop the trenches and, dugouts before their German defenders were aware of their peril. The German artillery could lay down no barrage, and line after line of trenches had been captured before they got into action.

While your mind is wandering into the future it is likely to be rudely brought to earth by a Tommy interrupting with, "What's good for rheumatism?" Then you have something else to think of. Will you come out of this war crippled and tied into knots with rheumatism, caused by the wet and mud of trenches and dugouts?

But many of the men were just lying on the bank, sprawled out and sunning themselves like alligators, basking in the warm sunshine and soaking up rest and good cheer. It looked like a good place for a concert, and so I quickly gathered an audience of about a thousand men from the dugouts in the embankment and obeyed their injunctions to "Go it, Harry! Gie us a song, do now!"