There was a broad-gauge railway.  On one side of it huge stacks of sleepers stretched away in long rows that were soon lost to sight in the wintry atmosphere.  On the other side was a barbed wire fence.  Beyond it lay flat fields on which the snow had settled evenly.  In one of the fields was the dim form of a farm-building, barely visible through the rush and turmoil of dancing snowflakes.

A Sergeant of the Royal Engineers came up and told us what our work would be.  We were to carry all the sleepers across the line and stack them in four rows on the far side of the fence.

“Is it a task job?” we asked.

The Sergeant did not know.

“What did they make us bring our shovels for?”

A voice, mocking such a naive questioner, answered: 

“Don’t yer know the army be now?”

We broke down a section of the fence.  Two men were assigned to each stack.  They loaded each sleeper on to the shoulders of a couple of men who carried it across the railway lines into the field, where it would be received and stacked by other men.

Hour by hour we trudged to and fro in pairs, bearing our wet and heavy loads.  We lost consciousness of everything except driving snow, squelching mud, aching backs and sore shoulders.  When one shoulder became so sore that mere contact with our load was intensely painful, we changed over to the other, until that too became bruised, and then we would change back again.  And so on, hour by hour.

Our legs seemed as heavy as lead and yet they seemed to move of their own accord without any effort of the will.  Our minds became blurred and numb—­a numbness that was broken from time to time by a sharp stab of pain whenever a sleeper was placed across our shoulders.

“For Christ’s sake, let’s ’ave a blow,” said my partner suddenly.

I looked at my watch.  It was a quarter-past ten—­nearly two hours more till lunch!

We observed that only a small number of men were working, and my partner blurted out: 

“I ain’t goin’ ter do more’n me share.  There’s a lot o’ fellers swingin’ the lead be’ind them stacks.  I’m goin’ ter ’ave a bit of a rest, I’m bloody well done up.”

We both went behind a stack and found that a crowd of men had gone there before us.  One of them shouted cheerfully:  “Here come two more leadswingers!” [idlers] We leaned against the wood and rested, but a few minutes had hardly passed when a Corporal appeared and shouted peremptorily:  “Come on out o’ that—­get on wi’ yer job an’ put a jerk in it.”  We struggled reluctantly back to our work.

The wearisome, monotonous trudge began again.  As the first stacks disappeared the journey became longer and longer.  I again looked at my watch—­it was twenty to eleven.  The quarter-past ten seemed several hours ago!  The way the time dragged drove us to despair.  But there was no escape—­we had to live through every minute of this dismal day.