And then one sees the ration parties trailing up again from the rear, and dinner has arrived; some kind of a stew, you know, as a rule, with bully as alternative; potatoes if you're lucky, jam anyhow, more tea, and some sort of pickings from home parcels in the way of cake or biscuits, figs or what not. During and immediately after dinner--in the dug-out we call it lunch, from habit, but it's about the same thing as the evening meal, as a rule--we always plan out the night's work, patrols, wiring, any little strafe we have on, and that sort of thing. We are a bit luxurious in "A" Company, and generally run to a mug of afternoon tea; sometimes (if the recent mails have been heavy) to an outburst of plum cake or shortbread with it. And an hour before dark comes evening Stand-to. Technically, this has some tactical significance, even as the morning Stand-to has actually. But as a matter of fact, in the evening it's a parade, more than anything else, to inspect rifles, check up ammunition, call the roll, and see the men are all right. By the way, you asked me something about the rum. I don't think it's issued at all in the summer months. What we issue now, once a day, is, I think, one gill per man of the half-and-half mixture of rum and water. I think it's a gill; a pint mug has to supply eight men. I think, on the whole, it's a useful issue, and can't possibly do any harm. It's thundering good rum; good, honest, mellow stuff, and very warming. About seven o'clock we generally have a feed, from habit, you know, that being the time we used to have dinner in camp in England. It's the same sort of feed we have in middle day. And after that, the officer who is going on duty at midnight, say, will generally get a sleep. The usual round of night work is well under way by now--patrols, wiring parties, work on the parapet, and so on, according to what the moon allows. If there's too much light, these things have to come later. With regard to work for sentry reliefs, the way we have in our Company is this: a sentry's relief--the sentries are always double by night and single by day--must always be within call of the sentry; therefore we never let him go beyond the bay next to the one the sentry occupies, that is, round the next traverse. Well, we hold the reliefs responsible for keeping those two bays in good order; clean and pumped, sides revetted, fire-step clear and in repair, the duck-boards lifted and muck cleared out from under them each day, and so forth. All used cartridges have to be gathered up and put in the sand-bag hung over the fire-step for that purpose, for return to store.