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Lying in mud, torrential rain turning the puddles into ponds, ponds into lakes, the scream and splinter of shells and the screams of men. This was night, and we had been ordered not to move. Earlier in the day we had been order to walk three feet behind a creeping wall of flying shrapnel and we'd done it. God knows why, but we had done it. Night fell through the rain, and we were left stranded in No Mans Land, with no cover save the shell holes which had become many a mans grave. We had to choose between drowning slowly, trapped in mud, or dying fast from a shell blast. It was no choice a sane man could have taken, but we were no longer sane. We weren't men, by any reckoning I can make. Who could call themselves a man and cry at the thunder? Exhaustion, the kind of numbness which coupled with the quagmire meant a creeping death, meant we were drifting in a hell of noise and death and water and stench, no longer with the strength to move, to fight or to do any more than concentrate on getting the next breath of foul air and muddy water into our starved lungs. In that dark maelstrom where every second was bought in blood from the lady of luck, I found myself lying, with my eyes closed, forehead resting on the butt of my rifle, thinking about cricket. Even then I had to smile, but while I was explaining myself to a comrade his head was shattered before my eyes and the smile fled forever. The sunny days, when the grass was greener than anything else in all nature and the sky shone deep blue. Those days, when hours were passed drinking tea and discussing the batting averages instead of lying in blasted mud waiting in dread silence for the next scream of a man you knew, seem like they happened to a different man. It wasn't me who crept up on that deer in the bluebell woods. I didn't paint Mrs Hawthorn's house in the summer of 1914. Even the winters, when there was rain, it was good rain, cleansing rain. Not like this death from the sky that drowned fully-grown men who were too weak to move. Rain is hell. Mud is hell. The smash and crackle of human thunder is hell. Adrenaline had long since run out, and it was strange being so dead tired and calm that I didn't get anxious about whether the next shell would get me. I lay in the howling chaos, yelling at the Germans to stop the infernal racket and let us get some sleep. Never before or since has a night been so long, and never has lying still been so tiring. My mind drifted away from the war for minutes, maybe hours at a time, but always my lungs tightened and I looked in fear over my shoulder as in the ghoulish green light of a flare another crater was formed throwing mud and worse high into the air. Through tear and sweat stained eyes I looked east and the sky was turning grey. All around me dead tired officers were shouting to the remaining men to stand up and march on the German bunkers. And we did, although I can't for the life of me remember why.