re.

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