Nor were such more or less natural phenomena our only hindrances. No sooner were the pits completed, than somebody more perspicacious than his fellows discovered that we had been ordered to lay them out in the wrong direction, and they had to be cut out still further to allow the platforms to be slewed round through the required angle. This order reached us one evening just as we were promising ourselves a night in bed after our strenuous labours, and the despair of all ranks spread like a mephitic vapour over the country-side in a mist of strange profanity. The men, however, whose spirits are proof against continued despondency under the most depressing circumstances, set to work with a will, and the tedious digging was finished at last. Then came the far more interesting business of revetting and roofing. Now, obviously revetting and roofing require planks, beams, iron sheets, and material of that nature, and equally obviously the department that professes to provide stores of this description, and whose imagination rarely soars above the level of sandbags, is utterly unable to supply such things. The only course left is to find them for oneself, and fortunately a row of houses whose inhabitants had been evicted stood on this occasion near at hand, and these we gutted. Doors, shutters, floor-boards, rafters, everything but the bricks themselves, we contrived to utilize, until we had everything we could desire except girders for our roofs, which were to be of earth. Now a fifteen-foot span of earth two feet in thickness requires a good deal of supporting, and after several experiments with rafters, experiments that sometimes had unpleasant results for those who conducted them, we decided that something stronger was required. Here, again, almost in the manner of the Swiss Family Robinson, we found what we required at our very door, but not before one adventurous spirit had invited an early death (from which may he long be spared!) by driving a particularly noisy lorry into a coal mine overlooking the German lines in search of pit-props. Our discovery was due to an eagle eye that discovered a notice-board bearing the words "Défense de circuler sur la voie," whose owner, realizing that there could be no temptation to circulate on the line if there was no line upon which to circulate, investigated further and found a grass-grown colliery siding. Here were our long-sought girders, and with their discovery our troubles were practically over. Certainly the guns had yet to be lowered into the pits, and hauling heavy guns over soft garden mould on a dark night is an undertaking to try the most angelic patience, but on this occasion, for the first and last time, the Mud-god smiled upon us, and that midnight we knew the true happiness that comes of the successful completion of strenuous labour.