'Get your tools together, sergeant,' he said, as several more lights flamed and a burst of rapid fire rose from the British rifles, 'and collect your party. Our job's done, and I'm not sorry for it.' It was just breaking daylight when the remains of the Engineers' party emerged from the communication trench and already the guns on both sides were beginning to talk. Beefy Wilson and Jem Duffy between them found Jigger's body and brought it as far as the dressing station. Behind the trenches Beefy's company and Jem's section took different roads, and the two old friends parted with a casual 'S' long' and 'See you again sometime.' Duffy had two hours' sleep in a sopping wet roofless house, about three miles behind the firing line. Then the section was roused and marched back to their billets in a shell-wrecked village, a good ten miles farther back. They found what was left of the other three sections of the Southland Company there, heard the tale of how the Company had been cut up in advancing with the charging infantry, ate a meal, scraped some of the mud off themselves, and sought their blankets and wet straw beds. Jem Duffy could not get the thought of Ben Shrillett, labour leader and agitator, out of his mind, and mixed with his thoughts as he went to sleep were that officer's remarks about pressed men. That perhaps accounts for his waking thoughts running on the same groove when his sergeant roused him at black midnight and informed him the section was being turned out--to dig trenches. 'Trenches,' spluttered Sapper Duffy, '. . . us? How is it our turn again?' 'Becos, my son,' said the Sergeant, 'there's nobody else about 'ere to take a turn. Come on! Roll out! Show a leg!' It was then that Sapper Duffy was finally converted, and renounced for ever and ever his anti-conscription principles. 'Nobody else,' he said slowly, 'an' England fair stiff wi' men. . . . The sooner we get Conscription, the better I'll like it. Conscription solid for every bloomin' able-bodied man an' boy. An' I 'ope Ben Shrillett an' 'is likes is the first to be took. Conscription,' he said with the emphasis of finality as he fumbled in wet straw for a wetter boot, 'out-an'-out, lock, stock, 'n barrel Conscription.' * * * * * That same night Ben Shrillett was presiding at a meeting of the Strike Committee. He had read on the way to the meeting the communique that told briefly of Sapper Duffy and his fellow Engineers' work of the night before, and the descriptive phrase struck him as sounding neat and effective. He worked it now into his speech to the Committee, explaining how and where they and he benefited by this strike, unpopular as it had proved.