and cared
less for, the tactical situation. All he knew or cared about was that
he had done a longish march up from the rear the night before, that he
had put in a hard day's work carrying up bales of sandbags and rolls of
barbed wire from the carts to the trenches, and that here before him
was another night's hard labour, to say nothing of the prospect of
being drilled by a rifle bullet or mangled by a shell. All the
information given him and his section by their section officer was that
they were to dig a communication trench, that it must be completed
before morning, that as long as they were above-ground they would
probably be under a nasty fire, and that therefore the sooner they dug
themselves down under cover the better it would be for the job and for
all concerned. 'A' section removed its equipment and tunics and moved
out on to the 'neutral' ground in its shirt-sleeves, shivering at first
in the raw cold and at the touch of the drizzling rain, but knowing
that the work would very soon warm them beyond need of hampering
clothes. In the ordinary course, digging a trench under fire is done
more or less under cover by sapping--digging the first part in a
covered spot, standing in the deep hole, cutting down the 'face' and
gradually burrowing a way across the danger zone. The advantage of
this method is that the workers keep digging their way forward while
all the time they are below ground and in the safety of the sap they
dig. The disadvantage is that the narrow trench only allows one or two
men to get at its end or 'face' to dig, and the work consequently takes
time. Here it was urgent that the work be completed that night,
because it was very certain that as soon as its whereabouts was
disclosed by daylight it would be subjected to a fire too severe to
allow any party to work, even if the necessary passage of men to and
fro would leave any room for a working party. The digging therefore
had to be done down from the surface, and the diggers, until they had
sunk themselves into safety, had to stand and work fully exposed to the
bullets that whined and hissed across from the enemy trenches.

A zigzag line had been laid down to mark the track of the trench, and
Sapper Duffy was placed by his sergeant on this line and told briefly
to 'get on with it.' Sapper Duffy spat on his hands, placed his spade
on the exact spot indicated, drove it down, and began to dig at a rate
that was apparently leisurely but actua