d to those at home who say it should be stopped. I
would like to make them lie out in a wet mudhole all night, come in
blue and cold and hardly able to stand, not knowing whether they had
feet or lumps of ice attached to their legs, and see whether or not
they would want something to warm them up--I think we would all have
been dead if it hadn't been for the rum that winter. You see, you are
"all in" after a night in the open, and all you want to do is to sleep,
so you crawl into the nearest dugout and lie down; now, the rum just
keeps the blood circulating and the body warm while you are sleeping,
so that when you waken you have not caught the chill that otherwise yon
would have done, for those dugouts of ours were anything but cozy and
comfortable. They were really only little huts in the trench, each one
large enough for two or three men. They were built up with sandbags
and had a piece of corrugated iron over the top; for the floor there
was usually two or three inches of wet mud. I assure you it was cold
comfort, and we were not allowed to lie in peace even here--a rat would
run over your face, or crawl over your body to see if there was
anything eatable in your pockets. Every bit of eats about us had to be
securely fastened up in our mess tins to save it from these pests. I
remember one morning I came in from sentry duty, and after having
breakfast I lay down in a dugout; we were given enough bread ration in
the morning to last us all day, and what was over from my breakfast I
put in my mess tin, but I had lost the cover of my tin, so I hung it up
thinking it would be safe from the rats. Uncle Sam was sleeping when I
came in, and I lay down beside him. I was enjoying a cigarette when
all at once I saw a rat heading for my tin; I didn't want to get up to
chase him away, so I reached over and brought up my rifle--there was
scarcely room to use it in the dugout, but just as the rat reached my
tin I fired. Uncle Sam leaped to his feet, scared half out of his
wits; he was sure that a shell had struck our dugout. When he saw what
I had done, he said, "Why in hell don't you take the brutes out when
you want to shoot them, and not be making a mess here?" There was only
about twelve inches of slush in the dugout at the time. But our
favourite method of killing this loathsome animal was to fix our
bayonet and, sticking a bit of meat on the end of it, put our rifle
over the parapet; then when Mr. Rat came along an