ON"
--JOHNSON 'OLES--TOMMY AND "FRIGHTFULNESS"
--EXPLORING EXPEDITION

As I had expected, the battalion were just finishing their last days out
in rest billets, and were going "in" the following night.

Reaction from leave set in for me with unprecedented violence. It was
horrible weather, pouring with rain all the time, which made one's
depression worse.

Leave over; rain, rain, rain; trenches again, and the future looked like
being perpetually the same, or perhaps worse. Yet, somehow or other, in
these times of deep depression which come to every one now and again, I
cannot help smiling. It has always struck me as an amusing thing that
the world, and all the human beings thereon, do get themselves into such
curious and painful predicaments, and then spend the rest of the time
wishing they could get out.

My reflections invariably brought me to the same conclusion, that here I
was, caught up in the cogs of this immense, uncontrollable war machine,
and like every one else, had to, and meant to stick it out to the end.

The next night we went through all the approved formula for going into
the trenches. Started at dusk, and got into our respective mud cavities
a few hours later. I went all round the trenches again, looking to see
that things were the same as when I left them, and, on the Colonel's
instructions, started a series of alterations in several gun positions.
There was one trench that was so obscured along its front by odd stumps
of trees that I decided the only good spot for a machine gun was right
at one end, on a road which led up to Messines. From here it would be
possible for us to get an excellent field of fire. To have this gun on
the road meant making an emplacement there somehow. That night we
started scheming it out, and the next evening began work on it. It was a
bright moonlight night, I remember, and my sergeant and I went out in
front of our parapet, walked along the field and crept up the ditch a
little way, considering the machine-gun possibilities of the land. That
moonlight feeling is very curious. You feel as if the enemy can see you
clearly, and that all eyes in the opposite trench are turned on you. You
can almost imagine a Boche smilingly taking an aim, and saying to a
friend, "We'll just let him come a bit closer first." Every one who has
had to go "out in front," wiring, will know this feeling. As a matter of
fact, it is astonishing how little one can see of men in the moonlight,
ev