view out in front.  One hadn’t long to wait around there for star shells.  One very soon sailed up, nice and white, into the inky sky, and I saw how we were placed with regard to the Germans, the hill and Messines.  We were quite near a little stream, a tributary of the Douve, in fact it ran along the front of our trenches.  Immediately on the other side the ground rose in a gradual slope up the Messines hill, and about three-quarters way up this slope were the German trenches.

When I had settled the affairs of the machine guns in the right-hand trench I went along the line and fixed up the various machine-gun teams in the different trenches as I came to them.  The ground above the trenches was so eaten away by the filling of sandbags and the cavities caused by shell fire, that I found it far quicker and simpler to walk along in the trenches themselves, squeezing past the men standing about and around the thick traverses.  Our total frontal length must have been three-quarters of a mile, I should think.  This, our first night in, was a pretty busy one.  Dug-outs had to be found to accommodate every one; platoons arranged in all the sections of trench, all the hundred-and-one details which go to making trench life as secure and comfortable as is possible under the circumstances, had to be seen to and arranged.  I had fixed up all the sections by about ten o’clock and then started along the lines again trying to get as clear an idea as possible of the entire situation of the trenches, the type of land in front of each, the means of access to each trench, and possible improvements in the various gun positions.  All this had to be done to the accompaniment of a pretty lively mixture of bullets and star shells.  Sniping was pretty severe that night, and, indeed, all the time we were in those Douve trenches.  There was an almost perpetual succession of rifle shots, intermingled with the rapid crackling of machine-gun fire.  However, you soon learn out there that you can just as easily “get one” on the calmest night by an accidental spent bullet as you can when a little hate is on, and bullets are coming thick and fast.  The first night we came to the Douve was a pretty calm one, comparatively speaking; yet one poor chap in the leading platoon, going through the farm courtyard I mentioned, got shot right through the forehead.  No doubt whatever it was an accidental bullet, and not an aimed shot, as the Germans could not have possibly seen the farm owing to the darkness of the night.

Just as I was finishing my tour of inspection I came across the Colonel, who was going round everything, and thoroughly reconnoitring the position.  He asked me to show him the gun positions.  I went with him right along the line.  We stood about on parapets, and walked all over the place, stopping motionless now and again as a star shell went up, and moving on again just in time to hear a bullet or two whizz past behind and go “smack” into a tree in the hedge behind, or “plop” into