A trench, especially in such country as this we're in, is not unlike a ship; a rather ancient and leaky wooden ship. If you don't keep busy about her she leaks like a sieve, gets unworkably encrusted and choked by barnacles, and begins to decay. If you don't keep improving her, she jolly soon begins to go to pieces. Only, I imagine the disintegrating process is a great deal quicker in a trench in this part of the world than it could be in the most unseaworthy of ships. The daily routine? Well, it would be wrong to say there isn't any. There is. But it differs every day and every hour of the day, except in certain stable essentials. Every day brings happenings that didn't come the day before. One fixed characteristic is that it's a twenty-four day, rather than twelve hours of day and twelve hours of night. Of course, the overruling factor is strafe. But there's also something pretty bossy about the condition of your trench. Some kind of repairs simply cannot wait. The trench must continue to provide cover from observation, and some sort of cover from fire, or it ceases to be tenable, and one would not be carrying out one's fundamental duty of properly holding the sector of line to which one is detailed; which, obviously, would be unthinkable. Still, as I say, there are some elements of stable routine. Well, here goes. It won't cover the ground. I'm not a competent enough jotter down for that, but such as it is---- We think of every fresh day as beginning with "Stand-to." The main idea behind this function is that dawn is the classic moment for an attack. I'm not quite sure that this or any other classic idea holds good in trench warfare, but "Stand-to" is a pretty sound sort of an institution, anyhow. We Stand-to one hour before daylight. In some Companies the precise hour is laid down overnight or for the week. Our skipper doesn't believe in that. He likes to make a sort of a test of every Stand-to, and so gives no notice beforehand of the time at which he is going to order it. And I think he's right.