Lance-Corporal Allan was killed on Tuesday the 6th of June. For the rest of that day I was all “on edge.” I wondered sometimes how I could go on: even in billets I dreamed of rifle-grenades; and though I had only returned from leave a fortnight ago, I felt as tired out in body and mind as I did before I went. And this last horror did not add to my peace of mind. I very nearly quarrelled with Captain Wetherell, the battalion Lewis-gun officer, over the position of a Lewis gun. There had been a change of company front, and some readjustments had to be made. I believe I told him he had not got the remotest idea of our defence scheme, or something of the sort! My nerves were all jangled, and my brain would not rest a second. We were nearly all like that at times. I decided therefore to go out again to-night with our wires. I had been out last night, and Owen was going to-night, but I wanted to be doing something to occupy my thoughts. I knew I should not sleep. At a quarter to ten I sent word to Corporal Dyson, the wiring-corporal, to take his men up at eleven instead of ten, as the moon had not quite set. At eleven o’clock Owen and I were out in No Man’s Land putting out concertina wire between 80A and 81A bombing posts, which had recently been connected up by a deep narrow trench. There was what might be called a concertina craze on: innumerable coils of barbed wire were converted into concertinas by the simple process of winding them round and round seven upright stakes in the ground; every new lap of wire was fastened to the one below it at every other stake by a twist of plain wire; the result, when you came to the end of a coil and lifted the whole up off the stakes was a heavy ring of barbed wire that concertina’d out into ten-yard lengths. They were easily made up in the trench, quickly put up, and when put out in two parallel rows, about a yard apart, and joined together with plenty of barbed wire tangled in loosely, were as good an obstacle as could be made. We had some thirty of these to put out to-night.