Duck-boards, by the way, or duck-walks, are a kindly invention (of the R.E., I suspect) to save soldiers from the bottomless pit, and to enable officers on duty to cover rather more than a hundred yards an hour in getting along their line of trench. Take two six-or eight-feet lengths of two inches by four inches' scantling; nail two or three inch bits of batten across these with two or three inch gaps between, the width of the frame being, say, eighteen inches. Thus you have a grating six or eight feet long and narrow enough to lie easily in the bottom of a trench. If these gratings rest on trestles driven deep down into the mud, and your trenches are covered by them throughout--well, then you may thank God for all His mercies and proceed to the more interesting consideration of strafing Boches, and avoiding being strafed by them. If you haven't got these beneficent inventions of the R.E., and you are in trenches like ours, then you will devote most of your energies to strafing the R.E., or some other unseen power for good, through your own headquarters, for a supply of duck-walks, and you will (if you are wise) work night and day without check, in well and truly laying every single length you can acquire. ("Acquire" is a good, sound word. I would never blame a man for stealing duck-walks from any source whatsoever--providing, of course, he is not so far lost to all sense of decency as to steal 'em from "A" Company; and even then, if he could manage it, his cleverness would almost deserve forgiveness; and, equally, of course, that he's going to use 'em for their legitimate purpose, and not just to squat on in a dug-out; least of all for the absolutely criminal purpose of using as fuel.) "What a fuss you make about mere things to walk on!" perhaps you'll say. "I thought the one thing really important was getting to grips with the enemy." Mmmf! Yes. Quite so. It is. But, madam, how to do it? "There be ways and means to consider, look you, whateffer," as Billy Morgan says. (Billy was the commander of No. 2 Platoon, you remember, and now, as reserve Machine-Gun officer, swanks insufferably about "the M.G. Section," shoves most of his Platoon work upon me, and will have a dug-out of his own. We rot him by pretending to attribute these things to the influence of his exalted compatriot, the Minister of Munitions. As a fact, they are due to his own jolly hard work, and really first-rate abilities.)