Then, the sentries changed, I turn back again to my dug-out. Sleeping with revolvers and equipment requires some care of position.
‘Half-past four, sir,’ comes after a pause and some sleep.
Out I get, and everybody ‘stands to’ arms for an hour, each man taking up the position allotted to him along the fire-platform. Gradually it gets light. Some brick-stacks grow out of the mist in front, and ruined cottages loom up in the rear, and what was a church. The fire-platform being here pretty high, one can look back over the parados over bare flat country, cut up by trenches and run to waste terribly. ‘Parados,’ by the way, is the name given to the back of a trench; here is a drawing in section:
| A. Bottom of trench. | C. Parapet. |
| B. Fire-step. | D. Parados. |
At 5.30 ‘Stand down and clean rifles’ is the order given; and the cleaning commences—a process as oft-repeated as ‘washing up’ in civilised lands, and as monotonous and unsatisfactory, for a few hours later the rifles are a bit rusty and muddy again, and need another inspection.
7.30. ‘Tell Sergeant Summers I’m going down to Company Headquarters.’
‘Very good, sir.’ Then I take a long mazy journey down the communication trench, which is six feet deep at least, and mostly paved with bricks from a neighbouring brick-field. There are an amazing lot of mice about the trenches, and they fall in and can’t get out. Most of them get squashed. Frogs too, which make a green and worse mess than the mice. Our C.O. always stops and throws a frog out if he meets one. Tommy, needless to say, is not so sentimental. These trenches have been built a long time, and grass-stalks, dried scabious, and plantain-stalks grow over the edges, which must make them very invisible from above. ‘H—— Street,’ ‘L—— Lane,’ ‘C—— Road,’ ‘P—— Lane’ are traversed, and so into ‘S—— Street,’ where, in the cellar of what was once a house, are two hungry officers already started on bacon and eggs, coffee (with condensed milk), and bread and tinned jam. We are lucky with three chairs and a table. A newspaper makes an admirable tablecloth, and a bottle a good candlestick, and there is room in a cellar to stand up. Breakfast done, a shave is manipulated, Meadows, my servant, getting ready my tackle and producing a mug of hot water.
9.30 finds me back in the redoubt and starting a ‘working party’ on repairing a communication trench and generally improving the trenches. Working parties are unpopular; Tommy does not believe in improving trenches he may never see again. And so the day goes on. Sentries change and take their place, sitting gazing into a scrap of mirror. Ration parties come up with dixies carried on wooden pickets, and the pioneer generally cleans up, sprinkling chloride of lime about in white showers, which seems as plentiful as the sand of the seashore, and the odour of which clings to the trenches, as the smell of seaweed does to the beach.