off to excavate the hole which I
proposed should form a sort of cellar.

It was a big job, and my servant and I were hard at it, turn and turn
about, the whole of that day. A dull, rainy day, a cold wind blowing the
old sack about in the doorway, and in the semi-darkness inside yours
truly handing up Belgian soil on a war-worn shovel to my servant, who
held a sandbag perpetually open to receive it. A long and arduous job it
was, and one in which I was precious near thinking that danger is
preferable to digging. Mr. Doan, with his back-ache pills, would have
done well if he had sent one of his travellers with samples round there
that night. However, at the end of two days, I had got a really good
hole delved out, and now I was getting near the more interesting
feature, namely, putting a roof on, and finally being able to live in
this under-ground dug-out.

This roof was perhaps rather unique as roofs go. It was a large mattress
with wooden sides, a kind of oblong box with a mattress top. I found it
outside in a ruined cottage. Underneath the mattress part was a cavity
filled with spiral springs. I arranged a pile of sandbags at each side
of the hole in the floor in such a way as to be able to lay this
curiosity on top to form a roof, the mattress part downwards. I then
filled in with earth all the parts where the spiral springs were placed.
Total result--a roof a foot thick of earth, with a good backbone of iron
springs. I often afterwards wished that that mattress had been filleted,
as the spiral springs had a nasty way of bursting through the striped
cover and coming at you like the lid of a Jack-in-the-box. However, such
is war.

Above this roof I determined to pile up sandbags against the wall, right
away up to the roof of the cottage.

This necessitated about forty sandbags being filled, so it may easily be
imagined we didn't do this all at once.

However, in time, it was done--I mean after we had paid one or two more
visits to the trenches.

We all felt safer after these efforts. I think we were a bit safer, but
not much. I mean that we were fairly all right against anything but a
direct hit, and as we knew from which direction direct hits had to come,
we made that wall as thick as possible. We could, I think, have smiled
at a direct hit from an 18-pounder, provided we had been down our funk
hole at the time; but, of course, a direct hit from a "Johnson" would
have snuffed us completely (mattress and all).