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 an odd broken board which there has not been time to repair. At the end of the war there will probably be slat-excursions organised by American tourist companies—they are said to have already purchased the ground—with the privilege to each pilgrim of removing one slat as a souvenir. What is to be said for them is that they stand between you and a flounder along the bottom mud. In winter, when the drainage improvisations prove false, and the fighting ditches run hip-high, the foothold is to be valued. And now as to the rats.

Ratavia, as one may designate it, resembles China in that there has never been a census of its population, but that it approximates to the mathematical infinite. They are everywhere—large rats, small rats, bushy rats, shy rats and impudent, with their malign whiskers, their obscene eyes, loath-*some all the way from overlapping teeth to kangaroo tail. You see them on the parades and the shelter-roofs at night, slinking along on their pestiferous errands. You lie in your dug-out, famished, not for food (that goes without saying), but for sleep, and hear them scurrying up and down their shafts, nibbling at what they find, dragging scraps of old newspapers along, with intolerable cracklings, to bed themselves. They scurry across your blankets and your very face. Nothing suppresses their numbers. Not dogs smuggled in in breach of regulations. Not poison, which most certainly ought not to be used. Not the revolver