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[Page 11]
or lesser degree with the rain. Should one chance to come upon some ground not much walked upon after a short lull in the rain, and that ground has been subject to the usual heavy fog or mist, trouble is your partner, In such circumstances I have fallen 3 times in ten yards - slipping, sliding and falling on any occasion. A man's equipment is smothered with it, rifle, breech bore and stock are chocked with it, and the whole body plastered with it. It becomes necessary to scrape off the thick of it with your fingers as you go along. Greatcoats, apart from their normal use of keeping a person's body warm, have the virtue of keeping the mud off ones body and thighs; but the tails of it get so covered with clots, which will not rub off that it is a burden to carry it. I will not attempt to estimate its weight. Boots, puttees and trousers ooze with mud. The apparition of a body of men coming out after a spell in the trenches, covered with mud, dragging weary legs, haggard, with unshaven faces, is not without its humour, if it did not have its tragic side.
The rain having abated, we climbed the hill and were introduced to our Camp (?). Save that word! Jacky Jacky never lived in a sorrier set of gunyahs in the worst days of his primitive existence. So many holes dug a foot or so into the oozing clay some ten or twelve feet by six feet surrounded by an eighteen inch wall of sandbags filled with wet earth, the whole covered by a tarpaulin fortunately good, supported at each end by an iron barb-wire support, the ends being filled in as the ingenuity of the architect would suggest. Insufficient room to sit up except in the middle, dark as Hades, behold the accommodation of 10 - sardines. The surrounding ground is 6 inches deep with liquid mud as a result of the passing of numerous feet. Can you question what the floor of our mainsion was like in a short while and its condition to lay our blankets upon? Such time as the Cook would announce breakfast, dinner or tea the patient queue would bolt when released with his dixielid of tea and a piece of bacon (if lucky) to his dugout. Primeval man - O Youth - experience! Such felic-
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