Unless there is real strafing going on the trenches grow pretty silent after midnight. At least, it seems so to the officer on duty as he makes his way from one end of his line to the other. One gets very tired then. There's never any place where you can sit down in a trench. I am sure the O.C. Company is often actually on his feet for twenty-two out of the twenty-four hours. I say it's very quiet. Well, it's a matter of comparison, of course. If in the middle of the street at two o'clock in the morning at home you heard a few rifles fired, you would think it remarkably noisy. But here, if there's nothing going on except rifle fire, say at the rate of a couple of shots a minute, the trenches seem extraordinarily quiet; ghostly quiet. You go padding along in your gum boots, feeling your way with your stick, which usually carries such a thick coat of mud on it that its taps on the duck-boards are hardly audible. You come round the corner of a traverse, and spot a sentry's helmet against the sky-line. "Who goes there?" he challenges you, hoarsely, and you answer, "Lieutenant So-and-so, ---- Regiment," and he gives you leave to pass. One has to be careful about these challenges. At first the men were inclined to be casual and grunt out, "Tha's all right!" or just the name of the Regiment when challenged. One had to correct that tendency. It is easy for a Boche to learn to say "Tha's all right," or to mention the name of a Regiment opposite his line. Plenty of them have been waiters, barbers, clerks, bakers, and so on in London. So we insist on formal correctness in these challenges, and the officer or man who doesn't halt promptly on being challenged takes his chance of a bullet or a bayonet in his chest. One stops for a word or two with every sentry, and one creeps out along the saps for a word with the listening posts. It helps them through their time, and it satisfies you that they're on the spot, mentally as well as physically. There's hardly a man in "A" Company who is not an inveterate smoker, but, do you know, I have never once got a whiff of 'baccy smoke in the neighbourhood of a sentry since we've been in trenches, never a suspicion of it! Neither have I ever found a sentry who was not genuinely watching to his front; and if the Colonel himself comes along and asks one a question there's not one of them ever betrayed into turning his eyes from his front. They're good lads.