I sleep in an outhouse with no door, on straw laid on a brick floor. My ground-sheet on the straw, my coat over me, my feet in a sack, and an air-cushion under my head, and I can sleep as peacefully as at home. The place is swarming with rats and mice, you can hear them directly you lie still. They go "plop, plop, plop", on the straw overhead, as if they were obliged to take long strides owing to their feet sinking into the straw. Immediately over my head, I should judge there is a family of young rats by the noise. Occasionally they have a stampede and a lot of dust comes down on my face.
'But one gets used to this, and muttering "Nom d'un chien!" one turns the other cheek. By the way, they say these rats "stand to" at dawn, just as we do.
'I am terrified of a rat running over my face, but my servant sleeps with me, so I console myself that the chances are just even that they won't choose me. I wish he wouldn't snore though he's lowering the odds.
'In the trenches one is not always doing nothing. These last three days in I have been up all night. I had a working party in two shifts working all night and all three nights, digging communication trenches. I used to go to bed about 4.30 a.m. and sleep till lunch-time, and perhaps lie down again for a bit in the afternoon. That is why my letters have not been so frequent.
'It is extraordinary that what is wanted at the moment is not so much a soldier as a civil engineer. There are trenches to be laid out and dug, and the drainage of them to be thought out and carried through. Often the sides have to be "revetted" or staked, and a flooring of boards put in, supported on small piles.
'Then there is the water-supply, where one exists. I have had great fun arranging a "source" in my trench (the support trench that I have been in these last three days and that I have been in often before). A little stream, quite clear and drinkable after boiling, runs out at one place (at about 1 pint a minute!) and makes a muddy mess of the trenches near. By damming it up and putting a water bottle with the bottom knocked in on top of the dam, the water runs in a little stream from the mouth of the bottle. It falls into a hole large enough to receive a stone water- jar, and then runs away down a deep trough cut beside the trench. Farther down it is again dammed up to form a small basin which the men use for washing; and it finally escapes into a kind of marshy pond in rear of the trenches.
'I quite enjoyed this job, and there are many like it; plank bridges to be put up, seats and steps to be cut, etc. One officer put half a dozen of his men on to making a folding bed! But it was not for himself, but for his Captain, who has meningitis and can't sleep. The men enjoy these jobs, too; it is much better than doing nothing.
'I will creep back to my quarters now and make myself some tea on my "Primus" (no fires are allowed).
'A cuckoo has been singing on a tree near me in full view. (It left hurriedly when one of our guns went off close behind the chateau.) The first time I have ever seen one, I think. It is amazing how tame the animals get. They have so much ground to themselves in the daytime the rats especially; they flourish freely in the space between the trenches.
'Things are fairly quiet and easy here just now.'
[In one of his letters to me (April 22, 1915), he said he had plenty of time now to watch the stars, and would like a set of star maps or something in order to increase his knowledge of them. Accordingly, I sent him a planisphere which I happened to have an ingenious cardboard arrangement which can be turned so as to show, in a rough way, the stars visible in these latitudes at any time of day and any period of the year. O. J. L.]
