The Tommies meanwhile had been smoking Gold Flakes, and one or two had also been exploring; one had discovered a child’s elementary botany book, and was studying the illustrations when I came up. Our combined view now was “Where is the lorry?” and this view held the field, with increasing curiosity, annoyance, and vituperation, for one solid hour and a half. It was dinner-time, and a common bond of hunger held us, until at last in exasperation I marched half the party in quest of our errant conveyance. I was thoroughly annoyed with the gallant corporal. Three-quarters of a mile away I found the two lorries. My little corporal had rescued his lorn princess, but she, being a buxom wench, had brought her rescuer into like predicament! And so we came up just in time to see the rescue of _our_ lorry from the treacherous ditch! I felt I could not curse, especially as the little corporal had winded himself somehow in the stomach during the last bout. It had been a feeble show; yet there was the lorry, and in it the bricks, on to which the fellows climbed deliberately as men who recover a lost prize. And so we arrived at our transport (the bricks were for a horse-stand in a muddy yard) at half-past two; after which I dismissed the party to its belated dinner. The above incident hardly deserves a place in a chapter headed “working-parties,” being in almost every respect different from any other I have ever conducted. I think the “working-party” is realised less than anything else in this war by those who have not been at the front. It does not appeal to the imagination. Yet it is essential to realise, if one wants to know what this war is like, the amount of sheer dogged labour performed by the infantry in digging, draining, and improving trenches.