It turned out a quiet tour of duty; the two lines were so close together that much shelling was inexpedient, and snipers gave no trouble. So all hands were free to attend their own comforts, notably the care and discharge of drains. The R.E. who, contrary to popular belief, sometimes have bowels, had added wooden floors to many of the little huts behind the redoubts. Company Headquarters were luxurious, with real windows, and even window-curtains; the slimy trenches were neatly boarded over and posted, and men went about their business almost dry-shod. It was, as we know, the custom of those parts that, before entering the line, troops should dump their ankle-boots at a farm-house just behind Red House, and go on in the long trench boots. For no earthly reason that the Irish could arrive at, the Hun took it into his methodical head one night to shell their huge boot-dump where, as a matter of course, some regimental shoemakers were catching up with repairs. The shoemakers bolted like ferreted rabbits, and all the world, except those whose boots were buried, laughed at them. So long as a man comes through it alive, his agonies and contortions in the act of dodging death are fair game. On the nights of the 4th and 5th January they began to engineer the detail of a local raid which marked progress in the art. Patrols went out from each company in the front line to hunt for weak places. The patrol from the right company worked to within fifteen yards of the enemy, got into boggy ground, noisy with loose wire, listened an hour to the Germans working and talking, and came back. The right centre company patrol slopped up a ditch for a full furlong, then ran into a cross-ditch fifteen feet wide, with a trip-wire (the enemy disliked being taken unawares), and also returned like the dove of old. Similarly the left-centre patrol, which found more ditch and trip-wires leading them to a singularly stout section of trench where two Germans looked over the edge of the parapet, and the general landscape was hostile. The left company had the luck. It was an officer’s patrol commanded again by 2nd Lieutenant Brew. Their crawl led them along a guiding line of willows, and to within six feet of a salient guarded by a three-foot wire belt. But a few yards farther down, they came across a gap our guns had made—not clean-cut, but easy enough, in their opinion, to “negotiate.” As far as men on their bellies could make out, the line seemed held by sentries at wide intervals who, after the manner of single sentries, fired often at nothing and sent up lights for the pleasure of seeing their support-line answer them. (“As we was everlastingly telling the new hands, the fewer there are of ye _anny_where, the less noise should ye be after making _anny_how. But ’tis always the small, lonely, miserable little man by himself that gives forth noises like large platoons.”) Then they were relieved by the 1st Coldstream, and their Acting C.O.