Then Tallents collapsed and “was removed to the dressing-station,” and 2nd Lieutenant F. Synge was sent up to relieve him. He was hit in the head almost at once, but remained at his post, and “never relaxed his efforts to get the position consolidated and tenable,” until he too was withdrawn to the dressing-station after dawn. By this time the barricade was completed, and the communication-trench back to the main body was sufficiently cleared to enable work to be continued in daylight. The smooth official language, impersonal as the account of an operation in a medical journal, covers up all the horror and sweat of the night, the desperate labour with anything that came to hand to make good the barrier, the automatic measurements of time and space as the struggle up the trench swayed nearer or farther, as well as the unspeakable absurdities that went sometimes with the very act and agony of a man’s death between the feet of his comrades. The things that cannot be recorded are those that are never forgotten. (“And a man can go missing in such kind of doings more easy than anything except direct hits from heavy stuff. There’s everything handy scraped up against a barricade that will stop a bullet, and in the dark how can one see or—what does one care? Bits of all sorts, as the saying is. And a man will take the wrong turn in a trench and then three or four bombs on him, and that shakes the side of it, the like of deep drains. Then the side all shuts down on what’s left, ye’ll understand, and maybe no living thing’ll come that way again till the war’s end. No! There will _not_ be much left over to a bomber that’s missing.”)