About seven o'clock we generally have a feed, from habit, you know, that being the time we used to have dinner in camp in England. It's the same sort of feed we have in middle day. And after that, the officer who is going on duty at midnight, say, will generally get a sleep. The usual round of night work is well under way by now—patrols, wiring parties, work on the parapet, and so on, according to what the moon allows. If there's too much light, these things have to come later.
With regard to work for sentry reliefs, the way we have in our Company is this: a sentry's relief—the sentries are always double by night and single by day—must always be within call of the sentry; therefore we never let him go beyond the bay next to the one the sentry occupies, that is, round the next traverse. Well, we hold the reliefs responsible for keeping those two bays in good order; clean and pumped, sides revetted, fire-step clear and in repair, the duck-boards lifted and muck cleared out from under them each day, and so forth. All used cartridges have to be gathered up and put in the sand-bag hung over the fire-step for that purpose, for return to store.
Unless there is real strafing going on the trenches grow pretty silent after midnight. At least, it seems so to the officer on duty as he makes his way from one end of his line to the other. One gets very tired then. There's never any place where you can sit down in a trench. I am sure the O.C. Company is often actually on his feet for twenty-two out of the twenty-four hours. I say it's very quiet. Well, it's a matter of comparison, of course. If in the middle of the street at two o'clock in the morning at home you heard a few rifles fired, you would think it remarkably noisy. But here, if there's nothing going on except rifle fire, say at the rate of a couple of shots a minute, the trenches seem extraordinarily quiet; ghostly quiet.
You go padding along in your gum boots, feeling your way with your stick, which usually carries such a thick coat of mud on it that its taps on the duck-boards are hardly audible. You come round the corner of a traverse, and spot a sentry's helmet against the sky-line. "Who goes there?" he challenges you, hoarsely, and you answer, "Lieutenant So-and-so, —— Regiment," and he gives you leave to pass.
One has to be careful about these challenges. At first the men were inclined to be casual and grunt out, "Tha's all right!" or just the name of the Regiment when challenged. One had to correct that tendency. It is easy for a Boche to learn to say "Tha's all right," or to mention the name of a Regiment opposite his line. Plenty of them have been waiters, barbers, clerks, bakers, and so on in London. So we insist on formal correctness in these challenges, and the officer or man who doesn't halt promptly on being challenged takes his chance of a bullet or a bayonet in his chest.
One stops for a word or two with every sentry, and one creeps out along the saps for a word with the listening posts. It helps them through their time, and it satisfies you that they're on the spot, mentally as well as physically. There's hardly a man in "A" Company who is not an inveterate smoker, but, do you know, I have never once got a whiff of 'baccy smoke in the neighbourhood of a sentry since we've been in trenches, never a suspicion of it! Neither have I ever found a sentry who was not genuinely watching to his front; and if the Colonel himself comes along and asks one a question there's not one of them ever betrayed into turning his eyes from his front. They're good lads.
And so the small hours lengthen into the rather larger ones, and morning Stand-to comes round again. It isn't often it's so absolutely uneventful as my jottings on the subject, of course. But you must just regard this as the merest skeleton outline of the average routine of trench days. And then, to be sure, I've left out lots of little things. Also, every day brings its special happenings, and big or little strafes. One thing we do not get in trenches, and I cannot believe we ever should, from what I've seen of it; and that is monotony, boredom, idleness, lack of occupation. That's a fancy of the newspaper writers which, so far as I know, has literally no relation whatever to the facts of trench life on the British Front in France; certainly not to anything as yet seen by your
"Temporary Gentleman."