These “reliefs” take place every four or five nights.  There was a time, not so long ago, when a regiment was relieved, not when it was weary, but when another regiment could be found to replace it.  Our own first battalion once remained in the trenches, unrelieved and only securing its supplies with difficulty, for five weeks and three days.  During all that time they were subject to most pressing attentions on the part of the Bosches, but they never lost a yard of trench.  They received word from Headquarters that to detach another regiment for their relief would seriously weaken other and most important dispositions.  The Commander-in-Chief would therefore be greatly obliged if they could hold on.  So they held on.

At last they came out, and staggered back to billets.  Their old quarters, naturally, had long been appropriated by other troops, and the officers had some difficulty in recovering their kits.

“I don’t mind being kept in trenches for several weeks,” remarked their commander to the staff officer who received him when he reported, “and I can put up with losing my sleeping-bag; but I do object to having my last box of cigars looted by the blackguards who took over our billets!”

The staff officer expressed sympathy, and the subject dropped.  But not many days later, while the battalion were still resting, their commander was roused in the middle of the night from the profound slumber which only the experience of many nights of anxious vigil can induce, by the ominous message:—­

“An orderly to see you, from General Headquarters, sir!”

The colonel rolled stoically out of bed, and commanded that the orderly should be brought before him.

The man entered, carrying, not a despatch, but a package, which he proffered with a salute.

“With the Commander-in-Chief’s compliments, sir!” he announced.

The package was a box of cigars!

But that was before the days of “K(1).”

But the night is wearing on.  It is half-past one—­time to knock off work.  Tired men, returning from ration-drawing or sap-digging, throw themselves down and fall dead asleep in a moment.  Only the sentries, with their elbows on the parapet, maintain their sleepless watch.  From behind the enemy’s lines comes a deep boom—­then another.  The big guns are waking up again, and have decided to commence their day’s work by speeding our empty ration-waggons upon their homeward way.  Let them!  So long as they refrain from practising direct hits on our front-line parapet, and disturbing our brief and hardly-earned repose, they may fire where they please.  The ration train is well able to look after itself.

“A whiff o’ shrapnel will dae nae harrm to thae strawberry-jam pinchers!” observes Private Tosh bitterly, rolling into his dug-out.  By this opprobrious term he designates that distinguished body of men, the Army Service Corps.  A prolonged diet of plum-and-apple jam has implanted in the breasts of the men in the trenches certain dark and unworthy suspicions concerning the entire altruism of those responsible for the distribution of the Army’s rations.