It is now broad daylight, and our ration parties appear, four to each platoon, trailing up the trenches from the rear with the breakfast tea and bacon. Each party dumps its dixey of tea down in the centre of the sector of its platoon, and the Platoon Sergeant dishes out to the section commanders the whack of bacon for their sections, while all hands draw their mugs of tea. The bread and jam and "dry rations" were drawn overnight. And so to breakfast, in the dug-outs or along the fire-step, according to the state of the weather. It's breakfast for all hands, except the sentries, and they are relieved to get theirs directly the men to relieve them have eaten. With the exception of those who are on duty, the officers get along to the Company dug-out for their breakfast, which the batmen have been preparing. They cook it, you know, over a brazier—some old pail or tin with holes punched in it, consuming coke and charcoal mixed, or whatever fuel one has. Fried bacon, tea, and bread-and-jam; that's our usual menu. Sometimes there may be a tin of fruit as well, or some luxury of that sort from home. Always there are good appetites and no need of sauce.
But, look here, I've just got to stop now. And yet I've only reached breakfast in my jotting of the day's routine in trenches. Isn't it maddening? Well, I'll get another chance to-night or to-morrow, and give you some more of it. I really will finish it, and I'm sorry I couldn't have done it in one letter, as it would have been done by a more competent jotter-down of things than your
"Temporary Gentleman."
TOMMY DODD AND TRENCH ROUTINE
You'll be grieved to hear that cheery, indomitable little Tommy Dodd was rather badly laid out this morning; four or five nasty wounds from shrapnel. But I think he'll pull through. He has so much of the will to live, and I am sure a soul so uniformly cheerful as his must make its body easier to heal.
I wasn't six paces from him at the time. We were fastening some barbed-wire stays on screw standards we meant to put out to-night. I had just lent him my thick leather gloves after showing him exactly how I wanted these stays fixed, with little stakes bound on at the end of them, so as to save time to-night when we are over the parapet. He was busy as a beaver, as he generally is; a bit nearer to Whizz-bang Corner than was quite wise—I shall always reproach myself for not keeping him farther from that ill-omened spot—when the shell burst low overhead. I got a dozen tiny flicks myself on hands and head, which the M.O. touched up with iodine after he bandaged Tommy Dodd. But Tommy was badly hit in the thigh, one arm, and the left shoulder.
He was parchment-colour by the time I got the stretcher-bearers along, and that was only a matter of seconds. We were close to their little dug-out, as it happened. He'd lost a lot of blood. But he grinned at me, with a kind of twist in his grin, as I helped lift him into the trench stretcher.