Writing to Pips, Sherriff was worried: ‘I have just heard that a party of men are coming down to relieve the East Surreys, and I am now anxiously waiting to see whether an Officer comes with the party to relieve me – I have been waiting for the last least three days for this and I am hoping that they may only be sending me and leave me with the party…’.

Pips had asked him to account  for his normal working day. Although he had already written of it on several occasions, he took the trouble to do it again: breakfast at 8:30 (usually porridge, bacon and tea); lounge around a bit while Morris cleans his boots, but by 10:30am he had to be ready to inspect the men who had come from the line at 8:00:

‘I have to see that their boots are clean – trousers and tunics brushed – equipment and rifles clean and oiled – that they have washed and shaved – and if they are clean enough I dismiss them and they crawl into little burrows and apparently sleep till they are awakened to go on duty again.’

From about 11 o’clock he would write letters until lunch at 1 o’clock. In the afternoon it would be more letters, or reading, or ‘I may go for a good sharp walk along some of the trenches to get warm,’ and at 3 o’clock there was another party to inspect, then censoring the men’s letters until tea at 4 o’clock.

At 5:30 he would walk up to where his men were working at the mine, before going to the RE officers’ dugout, where he would remain, apart from the times he would go around seeing that his men were working well, usually every couple of hours or so. He would make a final round at 5:30 am, before heading home, returning to his own dugout around 6:30, where he would sleep until woken by Morris with breakfast a couple of hours later.

He spent much of his time in writing and reading, and wished he had some ‘big history books’ wit him, although he cautioned that there was no point in sending them  out to him, because he might not get them before he had to move. But he was hoping to get ‘one or two of those compact little classics that I am so fond of’. Guy Mannering had lasted six weeks, he noted and now he would like ‘something like Carlyle or Aristotle – something nice and solid’. Of the ‘lighter reading’ type, something like Scott’s The antiquary, or the two books Pips had given to Bundy – Rookwood [by William Harrison Ainsworth] and Star Chamber [John Southernden Burn]. But really, any good book by any good author would do.

With Christmas coming up he was happy to leave the voice of present to Pips, although books would be good, as would some of the Xmas magazines. His mother would be making him some socks ‘and several like comforts’, and with all of that taken together he thought he would be ‘quite happy out here – or at least as happy as I can expect to be.’

[Next letter: 5 December]