The smell was a compound of stagnant mud, latrine buckets, chloride of lime, unburied and half-buried corpses, rotting sandbags, stale human sweat, fumes of cordite and lyddite. Sometimes it was sweetened by cigarette smoke and the scent of bacon frying over wood fires, sometimes made sinister by the lingering odour of poison gas.

The sanitary arrangements usually consisted of a pit, or series of pits, perhaps approached by a short trench and equipped with buckets or large biscuit tins which were emptied at night by the company 'pioneer'. The whole place was liberally treated with chloride of lime which provided a never-to-be-forgotten smell associated with trench life.

Latrines were always dangerous places because of the regularity with which they had to be used. Jerry soon came to spot such places, and, believe me, they were not places to linger.