rk as pitch, and about 11 p.m. Occasional shots cracked out of the
darkness ahead from the German trenches, and I remember one in
particular that woke us up a bit. A kind of derelict road-roller stood
at one side of the field, and as we passed this, walking pretty close
together, a bullet whizzed between us. I don't know which head it was
nearest to, but it was quite near enough for both of us. We went on
across the field for about two hundred yards, out towards a pile of
ruins which had once been a barn, and which stood between our lines and
the Germans.

Near this lay the trench which he had been telling me about. It was
quite the worst I have ever seen. A number of men were in it, standing
and leaning, silently enduring the following conditions. It was quite
dark. The enemy was about two hundred yards away, or rather less. It was
raining, and the trench contained over three feet of water. The men,
therefore, were standing up to the waist in water. The front parapet was
nothing but a rough earth mound which, owing to the water about, was
practically non-existent. Their rifles lay on the saturated mound in
front. They were all wet through and through, with a great deal of their
equipment below the water at the bottom of the trench. There they were,
taking it all as a necessary part of the great game; not a grumble nor a
comment.

The company commander and I at once set about scheming out an
alternative plan. Some little distance back we found a cellar which had
once been below a house. Now there was no house, so by standing in the
cellar one got a view along the ground and level with it. This was the
very place for a machine gun. So we decided on fixing one there and
making a sort of roof over a portion of the cellar for the gunners to
live in. After about a couple of hours' work we completed this
arrangement, and then removed the men, who, it was arranged, should
leave the trenches that night and go back to our billets for a rest,
till the next time up. We weren't quite content with the total safety of
our one gun in that cellar, so we started off on a further idea.

Our trenches bulged out in a bit of a salient to the right of the rotten
trench, and we decided to mount another gun at a certain projection in
our lines so as to enfilade the land across which the other gun would
fire.

On inspecting the projected site we found it was necessary to make
rather an abnormally high parapet to stand the gun on. No sandbag