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 sandbags to spare, of course, so the question was, “What shall we make a parapet of?”

We plodded off back to the village and groped around the ruins for something solid and high enough to carry the gun.  After about an hour’s climbing about amongst debris in the dark, and hauling ourselves up into remnants of attics, etc., we came upon a sewing machine.  It was one of that sort that’s stuck on a wooden table with a treadle arrangement underneath.  We saw an idea at a glance.  Pull off the sewing machine, and use the table.  It was nearly high enough, and with just three or four sandbags we felt certain it would do.  We performed the necessary surgical operation on the machine, and taking it in turns, padded off down to the front line trench.  We had a bit of a job with that table.  The parapet was a jumbled assortment of sandbags, clay, and old bricks from the neighbouring barn:  but we finally got a good sound parapet made, and in about another hour’s time had fixed a machine gun, with plenty of ammunition, in a very unattractive