Journalistic Anticipation.
"THE COMING GREAT SEA BATTLE.
Exclusive Pictures."
"Sunday Herald" Poster.
AT THE FRONT.
The subtlety of the Military mind beats and will beat me to the end. Yesterday we lived in a row of earthen dwellings in a depression in the ground, which anyone might be excused for referring to, if not as trenches, at least as dugouts. These alone of all the marvels of military engineering I have observed during the War admitted of being shelled with equal exactitude from due in front and due in rear; and water seemed to have been laid on throughout. Taking all these things into consideration some Authority labelled them, once for all, "Billets."
Last night we moved into a commodious cellar of a house which still leans against the next. It is only five minutes from town, and tramlines pass the door. Nay more, they stop abruptly at the door—such are the improvements effected by R.E. Inside the cellar are three bits of chairs, a table-top on boxes, and an inimitable ancestral smell that no deodorizer known to modern warfare can cope with. And all this is called "Trenches!" Our servants do their best to support the official illusion by neglecting to clean our boots and regarding with surprise and some little sadness any tendency on our part to wash.
But you must not imagine that life here is all honey. Even here we do a bit for our eight-and-sixpence. Every evening there comes down from the front line a report that our men there want more food. A stricter or less beneficent C.O. than ours might at once institute a court of inquiry into what has happened to all the food we gave them last night. But not so with us. "The boys want food," he says to the Adjutant, "and, by Heaven, the boys shall have it."