[Illustration:  ’Ere, you leave that ——­ rum jar alone.]

This necessitated the digging of a sap of about ten yards in length, collecting all the materials for making an emplacement, and mounting our machine gun.  It was now about 11 p.m., and all this work had to be completed before dawn.

Having rapidly realized that there was not the slightest prospect of any sleep, and that the morrow looked like being a busy day, we commenced with characteristic fed-up vigour to carry out our nefarious design.

A section, myself and the sergeant, started on digging that sap, and what a job it was!  The Germans were particularly restless that night; kept on squibbing away whilst we were digging, and as it was some time before we had the sap deep enough to be able to stand upright without fear of a puncture in some part of our anatomy, it was altogether most unpleasant.  At about an hour before dawn we had got as far as making the emplacement.  This we started to put together as hard as we could.  We filled sandbags with the earth excavated from the sap, and with frenzied energy tried to complete our defences before dawn.  The rain and darkness, both very intense that night, were really very trying.  One would pause, shovel in hand, lean against the clay side of the sap, and hurriedly contemplate the scene.  Five men, a sergeant and myself, wet through and muddy all over; no sleep, little to eat, silently digging and filling sandbags with an ever-watchful eye for the breaking of the dawn.

Light was breaking across the sky before the job was done, and we had still to complete the top guard of our emplacement.  Then we had some fireworks.  The nervy Boches had spotted our sap as something new, and their bullets, whacking up against our newly-thrown-up parapet, made us glad we had worked so busily.

We were bound to complete that emplacement, so, at convenient intervals, we crept to the opening, and after saying “one, two, three!” suddenly plumped a newly-filled sandbag on the top.  Each time we did this half a dozen bullets went zipping through the canvas or just past overhead.  This operation had to be done about a dozen times.

A warm job!  At last it was finished, and we sank down into the bottom of the sap to rest.  The time for the artillery bombardment had been fixed to begin at about 6 a.m., if I remember rightly, so we got a little rest between finishing our work and the attack itself.

Of course the whole of this enterprise, as far as the bombardment and attack were concerned, cannot be compared with the magnitude of a similar performance in 1915.  All the same, it was pretty bad, but not anything like so accurately calculated, or so mechanically efficient as our later efforts in this line.  The precise time-table methods of the present period did not exist then, but the main idea of giving the Opposition as much heavy lyddite, followed by shrapnel, was the same.