Page:Ambulance 464 by Julien Bryan.djvu/173

 For a cheerful letter from their marraine, as they call her, is a great treat to these men.

Two days ago, when I was at La Harazee, I visited the trenches at night and spent several hours in the first lines. I had promised Amulot, who belongs to the "Sappers" and lives in an abri near ours, that I would go to his mine the next time I was on duty here and take some flashlights of him working underground. He called for meat eight o'clock and from then on I had a most interesting evening. We took the same communication trench to the first lines which I had used before and then walked some distance along this before we came to the entrance of the mine. Here he said a few words to the guard. After this we went down a long series of steps, until we were fully thirty feet underground. It was very cold and damp and water trickled down in little streams from the ceiling. Then he took me through a long passage in the direction of the Boche trenches, and finally stopped in a little room which seemed to be the end of the tunnel. By the light of the pigeon lamp which he held in his hand I could see two poilus, one piling up powder in a great stack in a corner and the other who had a pair of microphone receivers on his head, listening to something very intently. Amulot whispered to me that the Boche trenches were only twenty feet above us here and that one of their counter mines was just ten feet