There was a curious sameness in this life in the trenches. We had no chance, as we had at the Aisne, of digging ourselves in, because the lie of the land was against us. At the Aisne our positions were very strong and we could afford to smile at the efforts of the Germans to dig us out; but it was a very different matter in country which is as flat as a floor. There was nothing impregnable in our little artificial gullies, and in this absence of help from Nature we had to keep our wits about us to escape the shrapnel and to prevent the nightly visits of our German neighbours. We were a mixed lot at Messines. Our line consisted of the Connaught Rangers, the Somersets, Bengal Lancers and some Ghurkas--a mere handful compared with the hosts of Germans that were flung against us, with an enormous number of guns. The more troops they sent the more we shot. Day after day this fighting went on, the German attacks getting fiercer every day. Nightfall was the time when they would make particularly stubborn attempts to drive us out. They would leave their own trenches and advance two or three hundred yards at a time, then throw themselves flat on the ground before beginning the next stage. We had them under observation all the time, but did not let a sound reach them; in fact, we lured them on by seeming not to be there. On they came, till they were something like fifty yards away, then we got the order for rapid fire, and let drive into the ranks that it was not possible to miss. In this manner great numbers of Germans were destroyed; we punished them terribly, for our rapid fire was certain destruction for their front ranks. It is not always clear to people, I find, that trenches may be constructed according to the needs of the moment, at all sorts of odd corners and angles. The idea seemed to be that the Germans dug themselves in along a perfectly straight line, while we dug ourselves in along a parallel line a few hundred yards away. In our position by Messines the trenches were splayed out, so to speak, some of them making an angle of ninety degrees or so with each other. We were so entrenched that we were inviting the Germans to step into a hollow square, or rather to form the fourth side of it, which with their heaps of dead and wounded they occasionally did. Of course the positions varied from hour to hour, both in guarding against attempts to enfilade us and in avoiding cross-fire between units of our own forces. One night a supreme effort was made by the Germans. The Indians had relieved us that very morning, and one troop of our men had got into a barn and cut loopholes in the walls, while another troop had taken up a position at a barricade made up of old wagons and sacks of earth.