This meeting with the Canadians was probably the last piece of enjoyment or tranquillity that Winterbourne ever had. From the moment he went back to his own Battalion his life became one long harassed nightmare. He was deluged with all sorts of documents requiring information and statistics he was totally unable to furnish. The blunders, the mistakes, the negligences of his inexperienced men were legion, and all were visited upon him by the martinet Colonel. For days and weeks he got scarcely any sleep and never once even took his boots off. He had continually to be up and down the trench, especially during the periodic six days in the Front line, and even in Support. He spent hours a day answering idiotic written questions brought by weary Runners and trying to puzzle out minute and unnecessary orders. He was always being told to report to Battalion Headquarters, where he was savagely attacked and reprimanded for the most piffling and unimportant errors. He went on patrol himself, contrary to orders, to make sure that at least one patrol a night was properly done—and was severely reprimanded for that. The boys, suddenly released from button-polishing and saluting and drill (which they had been taught to consider all important) became deplorably slack in important matters. They lost portions of their equipment, dropped their ammunition, never knew their orders as sentries, went to sleep on sentry duty, shivered when ordered to go on patrol, cried when put in listening posts in No Man’s Land, littered up the trench with paper, bully beef tins and fragments of food, urinated in the trenches, and “forgot” perpetually everything they were told. While Winterbourne was at one end of his section of trench, desperately and sweatingly trying to get some sort of order and sense into them, others were committing all sorts of military abominations at the other end. It was useless to “take their names” for punishment, especially as there aren’t many punishments as bad as being in the line. One day he did exasperatedly make the Sergeant-Major “Take their names” and by nightfall found he had collected forty-two. Ludicrous. The N.C.O.’s gave the job up in despair and let things drift.