Between the 5th and the 7th October the Battalion lost one officer (2nd Lieutenant Hine) and six other ranks killed and twenty-one wounded. Their trenches were moderately good, and had been regularly used, and they discovered dug-outs here and there, which enabled some of them to doze lying down instead of propped against the side of a trench full of moving men. This was great luxury to them, though their revolvers punched holes in their hips and their boots drew like blisters. The more imaginative wrote home that the life was something like camping out. The truthful merely said that they were having an interesting time, and gave their families peace. There was no need to explain how their servants brought them up their meals, dodging, balancing, and ducking along a trench as the fire caught it, or how, even while the hungry youngsters waited and watched, both food and servant would be wiped out together, with a stretch of the parapet under which they had decided to eat. Just where the Battalion lay, our front line was two hundred yards from the enemy—too far for hand-bombing, but deadly for artillery and machine-gun work. Our artillery was declared to be more numerous and powerful than the German, which generally showered our supports and reserves with shrapnel, while machine-guns kept down the heads of the front line with small-arm fire. Orders had been issued at that moment that recesses should be built, at twenty-five yard intervals in our fire-trench parapets, for mounting gas-cylinders, and the Battalion worked at this new fatigue under the direction of an Engineer Officer, Lieutenant Ritchie. The recesses meant nothing in particular, but gave people a pleasant feeling that there was abundance of gas somewhere in the background. They were regularly shelled, but, mankind being infinitely adaptable, had come in the few days of this new life to look on it as almost normal, and to alleviate it with small shifts and contrivances. “I think,” says one of the beginners, “that in those days we were as self-centred as a suburban villa-residence. The fact of not being able to put your head up without having a shot through it kept us from worrying about our neighbours.” Their first experience of external trouble in their underground world began on the afternoon of the 8th October, when loud bombing and shelling broke out two battalions down the line to the right, and some one from the 3rd Grenadiers came charging round the traverses asking for all available bombers, because the Germans had got into their line and were making rather a hash of things. Bombers were accordingly sent, though their experience with the live bomb was limited, and the two companies on the right got to work on sand-bags to bulkhead their right flank in case of a break through. No one really thought that they would be attacked, possibly for the reason that such a thing had not happened to them personally before.