But I’m getting off the track a bit. In the side of the vault, or cavern, there was a low, shallow dug-out which was meant to hold a rifleman lying at full stretch. This was something like a small cubicle in size and shape, and to enter it in the darkness was a proper problem. After a try or two, however, you got into the way of stumbling comfortably into it. By crouching and creeping, and using your hands and knees, you could secure a position from which it was fairly easy to draw yourself up into the dug-out. I dwell on this because I think it is important, seeing that four of us took two-hour watches throughout the twenty-four hours, so that getting to and from such a dug-out becomes an event in your daily life. At one end of the dug-out was a loophole for a rifle or a maxim-gun, and here we patiently waited for those pests, the snipers. These German potters gave us no rest; but many a German who thought he was well hidden got the finishing touch from one of our loopholes. This was thrilling fighting, especially when things became hot, and we manned all the loopholes in the fort, to the number of four, and at a pinch we could use two maxims at each. There were fourteen of us in the fort altogether, four officers and ten men. The orders, being in French, sounded very strange at first, but to my surprise, I soon fell into the way of understanding what was said around me, certainly so far as ordinary little things were concerned. I shall never forget the French for water so long as I remember the thirst I had in the black depths of the fort. The life in the fort was one of the strangest parts of the whole of the fighting. It was queer enough to be in France, fighting with the French, but a good deal queerer to be living in one of the big famous French forts which the Germans were trying to pound to bits with their enormous siege guns. But we soon settled down and got fairly well used to the sound of the fort’s guns and the row of the German artillery and the crashing of the shells around us. We were told off into parties in the fort, each party being commanded by a non-commissioned officer, who used to light the way for us with an electric lamp that he carried in front of him, hung round his neck. We ate and drank and slept with the French gunners, and taken altogether we were very comfortable, and were spared something of the awful noise of the firing, for when the guns of the forts were fired the noise was worse than thunderbolts, and everything about was shaken in the most extraordinary manner. The Germans were mad to get at us and they shot tons and tons of shells at us, and time after time made efforts to storm the forts and Lille itself. In these attempts they lost immense numbers of men, and when we got outside of the fort we saw the dead bodies of the Germans lying about in thousands--so thick on the ground were they that we had to clamber over them as best we could.