Except for the episode with the officer, this specimen night may stand as a type of Winterbourne’s life in the next eight or ten days. They went up the line at dusk; they were shot at, worked, and shivered with cold: went down the line, slept, tried to clean themselves, and paraded again. Four or five times they passed corpses being carried down the trenches as they went up. There was, of course, nothing to report on the western front. Then, just as the monotony was becoming almost as intolerable as drilling to the home-service R.S.M.’s “Stand still there, stand _steady!_” they had a night off, and were transferred to the day shift. But this was even more tedious. They paraded soon after dawn, and worked in Hinton Alley, about two hundred yards from the Front Line. Their job was to hack up the frozen mud—which was about as malleable as marble—extricate the worn duck-boards, dig “sump-holes,” and relay new duck boards. A job which in moist weather might have occupied two men for half an hour, in that frost occupied four men all day. A Lieutenant-General came along while Winterbourne was laboriously jarring his wrists, trying to hack up the marble-like mud. “Well, and what are you doing, my man?” “Replacing duck-boards, Sir,” said Winterbourne, bringing his pick smartly to his side, and standing to attention, toes at an angle of forty-five degrees. “Well, get on with it, my man, get on with it.” Vive L’Empereur. * * * * * Diversions were few, but existed. There were, for instance, the rats. Winterbourne had been too much absorbed by other new experiences to pay much attention to them at first. And during the day they kept rather out of sight. One evening, just about sunset, as they were returning down Hinton Alley, there was a block in the trench. Winterbourne happened to be just at the corner of the Support line, with its damaged, revetted traverses, and piles of sandbags on the parapet. The Germans were sending up some rather fancy signal rockets from their Front line, and he was vaguely wondering what they meant, when a huge rat darted or rather scrambled impudently just past his head. Then he noticed that a legion of the fattest and longest rats he had ever seen were popping in and out the crevices between the sand-bags. As far as he could see down the trench in the dusk they were swarming over parapet and parados. Such well-fed rats! He shuddered, thinking of what they had probably fed upon.