On the 16th December they returned afoot through eight miles of snow-storm to “some of the most depressing scenery in Europe.” The “men had had but little rest and few of them had got any of their clothes in the least dry.” But they were left alone for one blessed night at Combles and Haie Wood in their cellars and their dug-outs, and they slept where they lay, the stark, corpse-like sleep of men too worn out even to mutter or turn. Except that shelling was continuous over all back-areas and approaches, the enemy as a fighting force did not enter into their calculations. Or it might be more accurate to say, both sides were fighting ground and distance. The sole problem of the lines was communication; for every stick, wire, and water-tin had to be backed up by brute bodily labour across the mud. All hands were set to laying trench-boards from the support and reserve-lines and Haie Wood. Without these, it had taken two and a half hours to carry a load eight hundred yards. With them, the same party covered the same distance under an equal burden in twenty minutes. The enemy used their prisoners and captives for these ends. Ours were well tended, out of harm’s range, while His Majesty’s Foot Guards took their places. The front line—they relieved the 2nd Grenadiers there on the 17th—was “mere canals of mud and water with here and there a habitable island.” The defences had been literally watered down to a string of isolated posts reached over the top across stinking swamp, and the mounds and middens called parapets spread out dismally and collapsed as they tinkered at them. All dirt is demoralising. The enemy’s parapets had melted like ours and left their working-parties exposed to the waist. Since the lines were too close to be shelled by either artillery, the opposing infantry on both sides held their hands till there grew up gradually a certain amount of “live and let live,” out of which, but farther down the line, developed attempts at fraternisation, and, in front of the Guards, much too much repair work and “taking notice” on the part of the enemy. The Hun never comprehends unwritten codes. Instead of thanking Heaven and the weather for a few days’ respite, he began to walk out on the top of his mounds and field-glass our wire. Therefore, on the 19th December, the dawn of a still freezing day, two obviously curious Germans were “selected and shot” by a sniper who had been detailed for that job. “The movement then ceased,” and doubtless our action went to swell the wireless accounts of “unparalleled British brutalities.”