‘When I was out here first, all that we did in the trenches was to paddle about in water and use our rifles. We didn’t think of them as places to live in, they were just temporary inconveniences. Now we work all the time we are here, not only for safety but for health. Night and day. First, the fire-steps, then building traverses, improving the communication trenches, and so on; lastly, on our personal comfort—shelters and dug-outs. There was a territorial battalion that used to relieve us. They were hopeless. They used to sit down in the trench and say: “Oh my God, this is the limit.” They’d pull out pencil and paper and write home about it. Did no work on the traverses or on fire positions. Consequence—they lost half their men from frost-bite and rheumatism, and one day the Germans broke in and scuppered a lot more of them. They allowed the work we’d done in the trench to go to ruin and left the whole place like a sewage-farm for us to take over again. We were sick as muck. We reported them several times to brigade headquarters, but they never got any better. Slack officers, of course. Well, they got smashed, as I say, and were sent away to be lines-of-communication troops. Now we work with the First South Wales Borderers. They’re all right. Awful chaps those territorial swine. Usen’t to trouble about latrines at all; left food about and that encouraged rats; never filled a sandbag. I only once saw a job of work that they did. That was a steel loop-hole they put in. But they put it facing square to the front and quite unmasked, so they had two men killed at it—absolute death-trap. About our chaps. They’re all right, but not as right as they ought to be. The survivors of the show ten days ago are feeling pretty low, and the big new draft doesn’t know anything yet.’ ‘Listen,’ said Walker, ‘there’s too much firing going on. The men have got the wind up over something. Waste of ammunition, and if Fritz knows we’re jumpy he’ll give us an extra bad time. I’ll go up and stop them.’