Weariness. Mud. Death. So it was with great joy that we would return to billets, to get dry and clean, to eat, sleep, and write letters; to drill, and carry out inspections. Company drill, bayonet-fighting, gas-helmet drill, musketry, and lectures were usually confined to the morning and early afternoon. We thought that we had rather an overdose of lecturing from our medical officer (the M.O.) on sanitation and the care of the feet. “Trench feet,” one lecture always began, “is that state produced by excessive cold or long standing in water or liquid mud.” We soon got to know too much, we felt, about the use of whale-oil and anti-frostbite grease, the changing of socks and the rubbing and stamping of feet. We did get rather “fed up” with it; yet I believe we had only one case of trench feet in our battalion throughout the winter; so perhaps it was worth our discomfort of attending so many lectures! Our C.O.’s lectures on trench warfare were always worth hearing: he was so tremendously keen and such a perfect and whole-hearted soldier. A chapter might be written on billet-life. Here are a few more extracts from letters: “Oct. 13th. All day long this little inn has shaken from top to bottom: there is one battery about a hundred yards away that makes the whole house rattle like the inside of a motor-bus. The Germans might any time try and locate the battery, and a shell would reduce the house to ruins. Yet the old woman here declares she will not leave the house as long as she lives! It is a strange place, this belt of land behind the firing-line. The men are out of the trenches for three days, and it is their duty, after perhaps a running parade before breakfast and two or three hours’ drill and inspection in the morning, to rest for the remainder of the day. In the morning you will see all the evolutions of company drill carried out in a small meadow behind a strip of woodland; in the next field an old man and woman are unconcernedly hoeing a cabbage-patch; then behind here are a battalion’s transport lines, with rows of horses picketed. Along the road an A.S.C. convoy is passing, each lorry at regulation distance from the next. In the afternoon you will see groups of Tommies doing nothing most religiously, smoking cigarettes, writing letters home. From six to eight the _estaminets_ are open, and everyone flocks to them to get bad beer. They are also open an hour at midday, and then the orderly officer, accompanied by the provost-sergeant, produces an electric silence with ‘Any complaints?’ It does not pay an _estaminet_-keeper to dilute his beer too much, or else he will lose his licence.