During the whole of that first spell in trenches we had no water to drink except what we fetched from a natural trench half-a-mile away. Men volunteered for this duty, which was very dangerous, as it meant hurrying over open ground, and the man who was fetching the water was under fire all the time, both going and coming, if the Germans saw him. This job was usually carried out a little before daybreak, when there was just light enough for the man to see, and not enough for the Germans to spot him; and a chap was always thankful when he was safely back in the trench and under cover. At the end of the seventy-two hours we left the trenches. We came out at ten o’clock at night, expecting to be out for three days. We marched to an old barn which had been pretty well blown to pieces by shells, and into it we went; but it was no better than the trenches. The rain poured on to us through the shattered roof and it was bitterly cold, so that I could not sleep. We had everything on, so as to be ready for a call instantly, and without so much as a blanket I was thoroughly miserable. Instead of having three days off we were ordered to go into a fresh lot of trenches, and next afternoon we marched into them and there we stayed for six weeks, coming out seven or eight times. In these trenches we were in dug-outs, so that we got a change from standing sometimes hip-deep in mud and water by getting into the dug-out and resting there. A dug-out was simply a hole made in the side of the trench, high enough to be fairly dry and comfortable. During the whole of these six weeks it meant practically death to show yourself, and so merciless was the fire that for the whole of the time a dead German soldier was lying on the ground about a hundred yards away from us. He was there when we went and was still there when we left. We could not send out a party to bury him and the Germans themselves never troubled about the poor beggar. One day a chum of mine, named Tobin, was on the look-out when his rifle suddenly cracked, and he turned round and said, “I’ve hit one.” And so he had, for he had knocked a German over not far away and no doubt killed him. What with the weather and the mud and the constant firing we had a very bad time. Each night we had four hours’ digging, which was excessively hard work, and if we were not digging we were fetching rations in for the company. These rations had to be fetched at night from carts three-quarters of a mile away, which was the nearest the drivers dare bring them. These expeditions were always interesting, because we never knew what we were going to get--sometimes it would be a fifty-pound tin of biscuits and sometimes a bag of letters or a lot of cigarettes, but whatever it was we took it to our dug-outs, just as animals take food to their holes, and the things were issued next morning.