Quartermaster-Sergeant A.W. Harrison, 1st Battalion King's Liverpool Regiment, wrote: "Of course we are ready to move forward at short notice, but I am afraid the first three months have played havoc with one's nerves. No description of mine could give you even a faint impression of the present war. Can you imagine one living, day in day out, for three or four weeks in a trench 6ft. deep by 3ft. wide, with such cover as one can make with a few branches and a little straw, not daring to leave it except for counter-attack, smuggling in your food and ammunition under cover of darkness, and perhaps being shelled hours at a time without seeing a single foe? Fancy not shaving nor even washing for this length of time! If you can imagine all that you will have just an inkling of what not only the private but the officer as well has to undergo. Certainly there has never been less than three to one against us. Yet, thank God! the Liverpools' line has never been broken. Compliments from our General have been showered on us, but I have seen very little mention of us in the British Press. Our men laugh and say, 'What! Do you want jam on it?' They refer to the way some of the favourite battalions have been lauded for events which have been almost everyday occurrences with us." A private of the Royal Scots wrote to his wife: "We were thirteen days in the trenches at one place, where we only had to stand up a minute to bring a battery of German artillery on the top of us, and for hours we had to lie still or be blown to atoms. But never mind, the sun will shine again." A British soldier described in a letter a curious Sunday morning occurrence: "While the shells were flying we heard the most impressive music. There were strains like hymns, several hundred voices evidently taking part. We listened, missing not a bar except when a shell fell and deafened us for a moment, and then we discovered that it was a big body of Germans holding some sort of Sabbath festival at the other side of the little village, hardly two hundred yards away. One section of them was firing shells; the other was singing hymns; and we were playing nap!" Sergeant Harlow, of the Connaught Rangers, wrote the following in a letter: "When we were in the trenches a chum of mine, Johnnie Salmon, said that we would be the better of a cup of tea. At the time there was a heavy artillery fusilade from the enemy's lines. To make the tea Salmon had to enter a deserted house close to the trenches. The water in the kettle had reached boiling point, and he was about to make the tea, when crash came a 'Jack Johnson' and whipped the roof from the house. Fortunately Salmon when he extricated himself from the debris found he was uninjured, and walking over to me he nonchalantly remarked, 'The next time you want tea, Harlow, you can go and make it yourself.' He was apparently more annoyed at having lost the tea than startled at his narrow escape."