“You poor, bleeding fool!” said one of his comrades. “He’s drawn you in a lottery! Stood to win if you’d been hit.”

In digging new trenches and new dugouts, bodies and bits of bodies were unearthed, and put into sandbags with the soil that was sent back down a line of men concealing their work from German eyes waiting for any new activity in our ditches.

“Bit of Bill,” said the leading man, putting in a leg.

“Another bit of Bill,” he said, unearthing a hand.

“Bill’s ugly mug,” he said at a later stage in the operations, when a head was found.

As told afterward, that little episode in the trenches seemed immensely comic. Generals chuckled over it. Chaplains treasured it.

How we used to guffaw at the answer of the cockney soldier who met a German soldier with his hands up, crying: “Kamerad! Kamerad! Mercy!”