too, how Ben Shrillett would have shaped in
the Royal Engineers, and, for all his cracking muscles and the
back-breaking weight and unwieldiness of the wet sandbags, he had to
grin at the thought of Ben, with his podgy fat fingers and his visible
rotundity of waistcoat, sweating and straining there in the wetness and
darkness with Death whistling past his ear and crashing in shrapnel
bursts about him. The joke was too good to keep to himself, and he
passed it to Beefy next time he came near. Beefy saw the jest clearly
and guffawed aloud, to the amazement of a clay-daubed infantryman who
had had nothing in his mind but thoughts of death and loading and
firing his rifle for hours past.

'Don't wonder Ben's agin conscription,' said Beefy; 'they might
conscription 'im,' and passed on grinning.

Duffy had never looked at it in that light. He'd been
anti-conscription himself, though now--mebbe--he didn't know--he wasn't
so sure.

And after the trench was more or less repaired came the last and the
most desperate business of all--the 'wiring' out there in the open
under the eye of the soaring lights. In ones and twos during the
intervals of darkness the men tumbled over the parapet, dragging stakes
and coils of wire behind them. They managed to drive short stakes and
run trip-wires between them without the enemy suspecting them. When a
light flamed, every man dropped flat in the mud and lay still as the
dead beside them till the light died. In the brief intervals of
darkness they drove the stakes with muffled hammers, and ran the
lengths of barbed wire between them. Heart in mouth they worked, one
eye on the dimly seen hammer and stake-head, the other on the German
trench, watching for the first upward trailing sparks of the flare.
Plenty of men were hit of course, because, light or dark, the bullets
were kept flying, but there was no pause in the work, not even to help
the wounded in. If they were able to crawl they crawled, dropping flat
and still while the lights burned, hitching themselves painfully
towards the parapet under cover of the darkness. If they could not
crawl they lay still, dragging themselves perhaps behind the cover of a
dead body or lying quiet in the open till the time would come when
helpers would seek them. Their turn came when the low wires were
complete. The wounded were brought in cautiously to the trench then,
and hoisted over the parapet; the working party was carefully detailed
and