Perhaps at the first few steps you only sink about a foot, leaving your knees easily clear. "Oh! come!" you say (and that's where the devils of the glue patch laugh out loud). At the next step you go in a little deeper, and in your innocence give quite a sharp tug to lift your foot. You lift it all right, perhaps half-way up the leg of your boot, possibly ripping off a brace button in the process, if you've been unwise enough to fasten up the top straps of your boots that way. (The devils go on laughing.) Then you pause, reflectively, while shoving your foot down in your boot again, and take a good look round you, wondering what sort of a place you've struck. (This is where the devils have to hold their sides in almost painful hilarity.) While you reflect you sink, so slowly and softly that you don't notice it till you try the next step. And then, with the devils of that section roaring their ugly Hunnish heads off all round you, if you have no better luck than Tommy Dodd had, his first night in, you may continue reflecting for quite a long while, till somebody comes along who knows that particular health resort. Then two or three Samaritans with picks and shovels and a post or two will be brought, and, very laboriously, you'll be dug and levered out; possibly with your boots, possibly without either them or your socks. But what reduces the devils to helpless, tearful contortions of merriment, is a coincidental decision on the part of a Boche gunner to start peppering that bit of trench with shrap., or a machine-gun, during your reflective period. Then it's great; a really first-class opportunity for reviewing the errors of your past life. After this substantial _pièce de résistance_ (yes, thanks, I'm progressing very nicely with my French this term), you come to a delicately refreshing dessert in Sauchiehall Street, where the water lies very deep in most parts, but so sweetly liquid as to wash the glue well off up to our coat pockets. This innocent stuff can be pumped out quite easily, and is pumped out every day, into a gully, which we devoutly hope leads well into a Boche sap. But pump as you will, it fills up very rapidly. And so, with new washed boots (and coat pockets) to Whizz-bang Corner, where Sauchiehall Street enters the fire trench, and the Hun loves to direct his morning and evening hymns of hate in the hope of catching tired ration-carriers, and, no doubt, of spilling their rations. It was there that Martin of No. 3 Platoon got his quietener on the morning we came out. But with luck and no septic trouble, hell be back in a month or so. The surroundings are a bit toxic, as you may imagine. That's why, after even the slightest wound, they inoculate with anti-tetanus--marvellously successful stuff.