“Come on now, lads! Dig! Clear it out before the next lot comes down on us! Dig, if you want to live, you little beauties. Dig if you want to live!”

      Charley’s cold, numb fingers gripped the short handle of the spade. His body ached, weak with exhaustion. The spade’s handle was slippery with mud, and he lost his hold on it every now and again. It was all the more dangerous because he’d sharpened the blade too, because he needed to use it as a weapon sometimes. So he’d come close to cutting a gash in his leg more than once as it slipped in his hands.

      “That could have been us, under there,” Mick said, working beside him. “We could’ve been buried under there, you and me.”

      Mick was Charley’s best mate. They had enlisted together, trained together. They’d been sent out on to this insane battlefield in France together. They shared a dug-out together. Now that dug-out was buried here under tons of earth.

      “Yeah, well we weren’t,” Charley replied. “Just lucky, I suppose.”

      “Quit that chatter!” the sarge rasped.

      It was dark, and the small group of men and everything around them was cold. Charley was cold to his bones, like he’d never be warm again. A light shower of snow had fallen that day, on the hard, frozen ground. The floor of the trench was still like a marsh, though. It always was, its surface beaten soft by the constant traffic of boots.

      The steam of Charley’s breath looked bright in the darkness. At least the digging was getting him moving. They worked by the light of the stars in the clear night sky. The front wall of their part of the trench, eight feet high, had collapsed during the last German bombardment. Now they were struggling to get the mass of chalky clay dug out and the wall repaired before the German gunners dropped any more shells on them.

      Snow was falling again, and he looked up into the sky to see it shower out of the darkness towards him. They were working in the dark because, with the wall collapsed, the ramp of earth offered little protection. German snipers, crack shots, waited for an opportunity to pick off anyone who raised their head too high.

      Then there was the artillery. Charley had been terrified of it since he’d first heard the blasts, felt the first impacts through the ground only weeks before. There was nothing you could do to stay safe during the bombardments. You just cowered there against the wall of your dug-out, curling yourself into whatever cover you could find. You clutched your helmet to your head, scared as a child, as explosions punched craters in the earth around you. Sometimes they got so close, the noise of the explosions was like someone stamping on your brain. All you could do was hope and pray there wasn’t a shell plummeting right down on your position. You could only wait to see if it was your turn to be killed by the blast or the shrapnel.

      “Agh! Oh, for the love o’ God!”

      Mick was hopping around, a grimace on his face. The muck they were standing in was too thick and deep to hop around in, and he nearly fell over as his boot got stuck.

      “Don’t tell me you hit your foot again?” Charley laughed at him. “What kind of eejit are you? Keep it up, Mick, and you’ll end up chopping your toes off all together.”

      “Grand,” Mick grunted. “Maybe the brass will send me home.”

      “They don’t let you out of the war for chopping off your toes. They’re wise to that kind of stuff. They’ll just shoot you for bein’ a chancer!”