On the front occupied by the left company the German lines were invisible from the British breastworks owing to the lips thrown up round the Colvin craters, a series of some thirty or more of immense size which covered half the area of No Man's Land at this point. The largest of this series, the Mauquissart crater, occupied the site of what had once been our front line, and the breastwork now ran round its nearer lip. This mined area was the most uncomfortable part of the line, since the Germans were continually searching with trench mortar fire for the heads of our mine shafts while the cover afforded to enemy patrols by the crater lips themselves necessitated constant vigilance and counter-patrolling activity on the part of our trench garrison. Add to this the extreme hardship which the troops in this part of the line inevitably had to undergo owing to the total lack of dugouts and the perishing cold. The blowing of so many craters had, moreover, cut off the ditches between fields which had formerly been used for draining the trenches, with the result that there was no means of getting rid of the water which in a large number of firebays rose higher than the firestep. Under these conditions cooking in the neighbourhood of the front line was out of the question, and all cooked food had to be carried by permanent headquarter carrying parties from the Battalion cook-house near Ebenezer Farm; in the case of rations destined for the flank platoons this meant a trudge for the food carriers of over a mile in each direction at each meal. The defences generally had suffered severely both from the enemy's shell fire and the effects of the alternation of sharp frost and heavy rain, and an immense amount of labour was called for in working and carrying parties for the breastworks as well as for the wire entanglements, which were in a very weak condition. The single communication trench, therefore, became frequently congested with long lines of troops "humping" material and food to the front line, and altogether the Moated Grange was a hard sector to run efficiently and a remarkably unpleasant one to live in.