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of here and where during the alarms they both take refuge. The young man gave a vivid description of how he had been all but smothered to death by dust when he was pinned under the ruins of a bombed house. He insisted on coming to show us how to make a trench such as are used by the German soldiers: a simple triangle two meters high, sixty centimeters wide, and holding four to five people. Our peasant's brother, lately back from the war in the Balkans and whom we sent to a specialist to examine his eye, offered to dig the trench. So we now sit al fresco with our household and watch the planes flying over our heads, mere specks up in the sky, like buzzing insects heavy with poison.
Our house in fact seems to lie directly under the path-way of all English and American aeroplanes flying about in these parts. Yesterday thirty loads of bombs passed over us on their way to some beauty spot, alas! While we are peering up at these angry planes, suddenly a head comes between us and the sky. The new gardener is looking down the trench at us. A big head, small bony face, great lapping ears, a minuscule nose, long upper lip and a flexible, humorous mouth, such is the picture of this engaging freak of our garden. To him we must have appeared like curious mushrooms growing in a deep and damp crevasse of the garden.
March I2th. Yesterday while in the trench some forty American

Transcription Notes:
Aeroplanes in the second paragraph is written as one word, which I believe is the correct spelling. "Humorous" in paragraph 2 is spelt wrong, so I corrected it as stated in the general instructions