Soup. Salmon croquettes. Asparagus. Stuffed chicken and sausages. Fruit, custard and cream. Sardines on toast. Coffee.
Not bad for active service. One of us sleeps in the bedroom, Brand, Kitty, Carroll and I sleep on folding beds and big mattresses in the mess-room. All borrowed from Madame when we had charmed her tears away.
Yesterday I had a very good birthday. Please thank everyone very much for the parcels, especially yourself. They were topping and very welcome. Who was it sent all the chocolates? I could not quite make out.
I was very pleased; my servant gave me a box of Abdulla cigarettes, and the Battery, or rather the Sergeant for the Battery, presented me with another box.
In the afternoon, Brocklebank, my A.S.C. Captain, took me down to Albert in his car. It is rather knocked about, and the church has a huge figure of the Virgin Mary hanging down at right angles to the church tower; it looks very curious, why it has not fallen I do not know.
Then, after finding the people we wanted, we went up on to a hill with glasses to look at the trenches. Before, as you know, the trenches we were in were breastworks, moulds of earth in perfectly flat country, and we rarely saw the Bosche trenches except through a periscope. But here, from the top of the hill, we saw on a hill a mile or two away long lines on the hillside, where the chalk had been thrown up in building the trenches, and opposite them other white and brown lines, where the German trenches were, white lines in all directions--a sort of maze upon the hillside our trenches and their's--and behind that hill other hills in the distance, much like Salisbury Plain and Aldershot. There is a very noticeable difference in the country here in districts occupied by the English. Civilians here are in their farms right up to the firing line. In fact, in one instance, an old woman was known to live for ten days in her cottage, once a lonely country spot in the open fields, but now with a boundary on each side, one where the Germans held their front line and one where our front line existed. Ten days in No Man's Land! But here all things are different. One rarely sees a French civilian; even here, some twenty miles back, one sees very few, and in Albert one sees none. The trenches are also better. Miles and miles of wire and lines of trenches extend behind Albert, whereas North there is rarely more than one real line of trenches. The French are much more business-like and more thorough.