Sept. 7. Heavy gas-shelling on the lake this morning robbed us of our constitutional and forced an early return.
After dinner we turned out with torches and heavy sticks to hunt rats round the dug-outs. There were no casualties among the rats, but Day sprained an ankle.
Sept. 8. Still brick dumping, although no progress is apparent as yet. During the morning I walked across the dyke to talk to the company working in the morass on the far side and sincerely wished I hadn’t. They had been finding bodies all morning, not more than a month dead and just coming to the worst stages. Whilst I was there, they picked up two kilted officers—glorious big men they must have been but looking so childishly pathetic as they lay there. Unconsciously we all fell silent, and I saw a D.C.M. Sergeant-Major with tears in his eyes. Hurriedly I turned away and, walking back to the men, thanked God that people at home can never even imagine the deaths their men are called upon to die.
We are going into the war again to-morrow. The rains are with us.
Sept. 9. Two sections moved into forward billets at Negro Farm—an appalling place consisting of two stinking dug-outs under the ruins of the former homestead—it beggars description but closely resembles that famous Bairnsfather drawing, “We are staying at a farm.” It has poured all day, and when we arrived about eleven this morning there wasn’t shelter for a quarter of the men and none for the horses. I explored two or three ruins in the neighbourhood, but they were all worse than our own midden, so we had to make the best of it. Fortunately the cheerfulness of the men seems to increase with their misfortunes and they are now all under cover of some sort—even the horses are more or less protected from the worst of the weather.
My home consists of three battered sheets of corrugated iron, a wagon cover, and the back of a hen shed, reared miraculously against a bank of earth which is the mainstay of the edifice. Light from a candle in a port bottle, no H. and C. or modern conveniences of any sort. It is cold, damp, miserable, and the headquarters of two sections, Royal Engineers. Yet you wouldn’t offer it to a tramp at home and a pig would scorn it—great are the blessings of civilisation!
I decided to keep one section in reserve, so took No. 3 up the line for night work.
SKETCH MAP SHOWING ADVANCE FROM COURTRAI TO SCHELDT
Arrived very late as all the tracks were knee-deep in slush and it was dark, dark as the inside of an infidel.