was Secretary
an' Treasurer an' things o' other societies as well as ours. 'E fought
the War right along, an' 'e's still fightin' it. 'E's a anti-militant,
'e ses.'

'Anti-militarist,' Jem corrected. He had taken some pains himself in
the old days to get the word itself and some of its meaning right.

'Anti-military-ist then,' said Beefy. 'Any'ow, 'e stuck out agin all
sorts o' soldierin'. This stoppin' the Society benefits was a trump
card too. It blocked a whole crowd from listin' that I know myself
would ha' joined. Queered the boss's sons raisin' that Company too.
They 'ad Frickers an' the B.S.L. Co. an' the works to draw from. Could
ha' raised a couple hundred easy if Ben Shrillett 'adn't got at 'em.
You know 'ow 'e talks the fellers round.'

'I know,' agreed Jem, sucking hard at his pipe.

The Sergeant broke in on their talk. 'Now then,' he said briskly.
'Sooner we start, sooner we're done an' off 'ome to our downy couch.
'Ere, Duffy'--and he pointed out the work Duffy was to start.

For a good two hours the Engineers laboured like slaves again. The
trench was so badly wrecked that it practically had to be
reconstructed. It was dangerous work because it meant moving freely up
and down, both where cover was and was not. It was physically heavy
work because spade work in wet ground must always be that; and when the
spade constantly encounters a debris of broken beams, sandbags, rifles,
and other impediments, and the work has to be performed in
eye-confusing alternations of black darkness and dazzling flares, it
makes the whole thing doubly hard. When you add in the constant whisk
of passing bullets and the smack of their striking, the shriek and
shattering burst of high-explosive shells, and the drone and whirr of
flying splinters, you get labour conditions removed to the utmost limit
from ideal, and, to any but the men of the Sappers, well over the edge
of the impossible. The work at any other time would have been gruesome
and unnerving, because the gasping and groaning of the wounded hardly
ceased from end to end of the captured trench, and in digging out the
collapsed sections many dead Germans and some British were found
blocking the vigorous thrust of the spades.

Duffy was getting 'fair fed up,' although he still worked on
mechanically. He wondered vaguely what Ben Shrillett would have said
to any member of the trade union that had worked a night, a day, and a
night on end. He wondered,