Now with the weeks which have gone by since we broke off relations with the rest of the world it is quite different, and we pander to our little weakness of forty winks before a loophole, although orderly officers may stumble by all night on their rounds and curse and swear at this state of affairs.  By training yourself, however, I have found that you can practically sleep like a dog, with one eye open and both ears on the alert—­that light slumber which the faintest stirring immediately breaks; when you are like this you can do your duty at a loophole.

It is such dull work, too, in front of the eternal loopholes, with nothing but darkness and thick shadows around you, and the rest of a post of four or five men vigorously snoring.  The first half hour goes fairly quickly, and, perhaps even the second; but the last hour is dreary, tiresome work.  And when your two hours are up, and contentedly you kick your relief on the ground beside you, he only moans faintly, but does not stir.  Dead with sleep is he.  Then you kick him again with all that zest which comes from a sense of your own lost slumbers, and once more he moans in his fatigue, more loudly this time, but still he does not move.

Finally, in angry despair you land the butt of your rifle brutally on his chest, and he will start up with a cry or an oath.

“Time,” you mutter.  The relief grumblingly rises to his feet, rubbing his glued eyes violently, and asks you if there is anything.  “Nothing,” you answer curtly.  It is always nothing, for although the enemy’s barricades rear themselves perhaps not more than twenty or thirty feet from where you stand, you know that it takes a lusty stomach to rush that distance and climb your fortifications and ditches in the dark in the face of the furious fire which sooner or later would burst out.  For we understand our work now.  Experience is the only schoolmaster.

So with your two hours on and your four hours off the night spends itself and dawn blushes in the skies.  It is in all truth weary work, those long watches of the night....  Sometimes even your four hours’ sleeping time is rudely broken into by half a dozen alarms; for separated sometimes by hundreds of feet from your comrades of the next post, the instinct of self-preservation makes you line your loopholes and peer anxiously into the gloom beyond, when any one of the enemy shows that he is afoot.  A single rifle-shot spitting off near by is as often as not the cause of the alarm; for that rifle-shot cracking out discordantly and awakening the echoes may be the signal for the dread rush which would spell the beginning of the end.  Once one line is broken into we know instinctively that the confusion which would follow would engulf us all.  There is no confidence....

When you have time you may relieve his monotony by sniping.