The greatest interest one had in the daytime was sitting on the damp
straw in our clay vault, scraping the mud off one's saturated boots and
clothes. The event to which one looked forward with the greatest
interest was the arrival of letters in the evening.

Now and again we got out of our dug-out and sloshed down the trench to
scheme out some improvement or other, or to furtively look out across
the water-logged turnip field at the Boche trenches opposite.
Occasionally, in the silent, still, foggy mornings, a voice from
somewhere in the alluvial depths of a miserable trench, would suddenly
burst into a scrap of song, such as--

Old soldiers never die,
They simply fade away.

--a voice full of "fed-upness," steeped in determination.

Then all would be silence for the next couple of hours, and so the day
passed.

[Illustration: The Knave of Spades.]

At dusk, my job was to emerge from this horrible drain and go round the
various machine-gun positions. What a job! I generally went alone, and
in the darkness struck out across the sodden field, tripping,
stumbling, and sometimes falling into various shell holes on the way.

One does a little calling at this time of day. Having seen a gun in
another trench, one looks up the nearest platoon commander. You look