To give a recipe for getting a rough idea, in case you want to, I
recommend the following procedure. Select a flat ten-acre ploughed
field, so sited that all the surface water of the surrounding country
drains into it. Now cut a zig-zag slot about four feet deep and three
feet wide diagonally across, dam off as much water as you can so as to
leave about a hundred yards of squelchy mud; delve out a hole at one
side of the slot, then endeavour to live there for a month on bully beef
and damp biscuits, whilst a friend has instructions to fire at you with
his Winchester every time you put your head above the surface.

Well, here I was, anyway, and the next thing was to make the best of it.
As I have before said, these were the days of the earliest trenches in
this war: days when we had none of those desirable "props," such as
corrugated iron, floorboards, and sand bags _ad lib_.

[Illustration: "ullo! 'Arry"]

When you made a dug-out in those days you made it out of anything you
could find, and generally had to make it yourself. That first night I
was "in" I discovered, after a humid hour or so, that our battalion
wouldn't fit into the spaces left by the last one, and as regards
dug-outs, the truth of that mathematical axiom, "Two's into one, won't
go," suddenly dawned on me with painful clearness. I was faced with
making a dug-out, and it was raining, of course. (_Note._--Whenever I
don't state the climatic conditions, read "raining.") After sloshing
about in several primitive trenches in the vicinity of the spot where we
had fixed our best machine-gun position, my sergeant and I discovered a
sort of covered passage in a ditch in front of a communication trench.
It was a sort of emergency exit back from a row of ramshackle,
water-logged hovels in the ditch to the communication trench. We decided