I went off for a sleep. The time between stand-to and breakfast was the easy part of the day. The men who were not getting in a bit of extra sleep sat about talking and smoking, writing letters home, cleaning their rifles, running their thumb-nails up the seams of their shirts to kill the lice, gambling. Lice were a standing joke. Young Bumford handed me one like this. ‘We was just having an argument as to whether it was best to kill the old ones or the young ones, sir. Morgan here says that if you kill the old ones, the young ones will die of grief, but Parry here, sir, he says that the young ones are easier to kill and you can catch the old ones when they come to the funeral.’ He appealed to me as an arbiter. ‘You’ve been to college, sir, haven’t you?’ I said: ‘Yes, I had, but so had Crawshay Bailey’s brother Norwich.’ This was held to be a wonderfully witty answer. _Crawshay Bailey_ is one of the idiotic songs of Wales. (Crawshay Bailey himself ‘had an engine and he couldn’t make it go,’ and all his relations in the song had similar shortcomings. Crawshay Bailey’s brother Norwich, for instance, was fond of oatmeal porridge, and was sent to Cardiff College, for to get a bit of knowledge.) After that I had no trouble with the platoon at all. Breakfast at company headquarters was bacon, eggs, coffee, toast and marmalade. There were three chairs and two ammunition-boxes to sit on. Accustomed to company commanders in England not taking their junior officers into their confidence, I was struck by the way that questions of the day were settled at meal-times by a sort of board-meeting with Dunn as chairman. On this first morning there was a long debate as to the best way of keeping sentries awake. Dunn finally decided to issue a company order against sentries leaning up against the traverse; it made them sleepy. Besides, when they fired their rifles the flash would come always from the same place. The Germans might fix a rifle on the spot after a time. I told Dunn of the bullet that came between Beaumont and myself. ‘Sounds like a fixed rifle,’ he said, ‘because not one aimed shot in a hundred comes as close as that at night. And we had a chap killed in that very traverse the night we came in.’ The Bavarian Guards Reserve were opposite us at the time and their shooting was good. They had complete control of the sniping situation.