The next evening I was leading up A Company for a working-party. B and D Companies were in the line and we overtook C, which was also going up to work. David was bringing up the rear of C. He was looking strange, worried about something. I had never seen him anything but cheerful all the time I had known him. I asked what was the matter. He said: ‘Oh, I’m fed up and I’ve got a cold.’ C Company went along to the right of the battalion frontage and we went along to the left. It was a weird kind of night, with a bright moon. A German occupied sap was only forty or fifty yards away. We were left standing on the parapet piling up the sandbags, with the moon behind us, but the German sentries ignored us—probably because they had work on hand themselves. It often happened when both sides were busy putting up proper defences that they turned a blind eye to each other’s work. Sometimes, it was said, the rival wiring-parties ‘as good as borrowed each other’s mallets’ for hammering in the pickets. The Germans were much more ready to live and let live than we were. (The only time, so far as I know, besides Christmas 1914, that both sides showed themselves in daylight without firing at each other was once at Ypres when the trenches got so flooded that there was nothing for it but for both sides to crawl out on top to avoid drowning.) There was a continual exchange of grenades and trench-mortars on our side; the canister was going over and the men found it difficult to get out of its way in the dark. But for the first time we were giving the enemy as good as they gave us. Pritchard had been using his Stokes’ mortar all day and had sent over two or three hundred rounds; twice they had located his emplacement and he had had to shift hurriedly.