You will easily understand that of all things in trench warfare nothing is more important than the ability of your Company to man the fire-step, ready to repel an attack, or to make one, on the shortest possible notice. When the order comes there must be no fiddling about looking for rifles, or appearing on the fire-step with incomplete equipment. See how useless that would be in the event of a surprise attack in the dark, when the enemy could creep very close indeed to your parapet before the best of sentries could give any alarm! Troops in the firing line must be able to turn out, equipped in every detail for fighting--for days on end of fighting--not only quickly, but instantly; without any delay at all. That is why, in the British Army, at all events--and I've no doubt the French are the same--nobody in the firing line is allowed to remove his equipment. Officer and man alike, when we lie down to sleep, we lie down in precisely the same order as we go into action: haversack and water-bottle, ammunition and everything complete. That detail of the filled water-bottle, for instance, may make all the difference between a man who is an asset to his country in a critical action and a man who is useless and a bad example. You never know the moment at which an action that will last forty-eight hours or more is going to begin; and, though a man may keep going a long while without food, he's not much use if he cannot rinse his mouth out after a bit. But at this rate I shall never get done. It's always so when I set out to write to you about any specific thing. Well, we Stand-to an hour before dawn. It happens this way: "the Peacemaker" is in the trench doing something, or he comes out of the dug-out. He looks at his watch and at the sky, and he tells his orderly to bring another orderly. Then he says to the pair of them: "Pass the word to Stand-to." One bolts along the trench to the left and one to the right; and as they hurry along they give the word to every sentry and to everyone they see: "Stand-to!" Meanwhile "the Peacemaker" pokes about and observes, and jumps like a hundred of bricks on any man whose bayonet is not fixed, whose belt is unbuckled, or who is slow in getting to the fire-step. All this time he has his watch in his hand. Pretty soon the first of those two orderlies comes racing back. Very often they see each other approaching the Officer Commanding from opposite directions, and make a real race of it, and report breathlessly: "All correct, sir." To be able to do this, they must have got the word from each Platoon Sergeant. Probably about this time the officer on duty comes along from whatever part of the line he happens to have been patrolling at the time. And he also reports that all was correct in the part of the line he has come from, or that such and such a section was a bit behind this morning, and that Corporal So-and-so wants a little stirring up.