Day came, and with it the _corvée_ carrying hot coffee and bread. After breakfast another _corvée_ was sent after picks and shovels, and the men were set to work remodeling the trench, shifting the parapet to the other side, building little outpost trenches and setting barbed wire. The latter job was done in a wonderfully short time, thanks to German thoroughness, since for the stakes to which the wire is tied the Boches had substituted soft iron rods, three quarters of an inch thick, twisted five times in the shape of a great corkscrew. This screw twisted into the ground exactly like a cork-puller into a cork. The straight part of the rod, being twisted upon itself down and up again every ten inches, formed six or seven small round loops in a height of about five feet. Into these eyes the barbed wire was laid and solidly secured with short lengths of tying wire. First cutting the tying wire, we lifted the barbed wire out of the eyes, shoved a small stick through one and, turning the rod with the leverage of the stick, unscrewed it out of the ground and then reversing the process screwed it in again. The advantage of this rod is obvious. When a shell falls amidst this wire protection, the rods are bent and twisted, but unless broken off short they always support the wire, and even after a severe bombardment present a serious obstacle to the assaulters. In such cases wooden posts are blown to smithereens by the shells, and when broken off let the wire fall flat to the ground.
As I was walking up and down, watching the work, I noticed a large box, resting bottom up, in a deep hole opening from the trench. Dragging the box out and turning it over, I experienced a sudden flutter of the heart. There, before my astonished eyes, resting upon a little platform of boards, stood a neat little centrifugal pump painted green and on the base of it in raised iron letters I read the words "Byron Jackson, San Francisco." I felt queer at the stomach for an instant. San Francisco! my home town! Before my eyes passed pictures of Market Street and the "Park." In fancy I was one of the Sunday crowd at the Cliff House. How could this pump have got so far from home? Many times I had passed the very place where it was made. How, I wonder, did the Boche get this pump? Before the war or through Holland? A California-built pump to clean water out of German trenches, in France! It was astonishing! With something like reverence I put the pump back again and, going to my place in the trench, dug out one of my bottles of champagne and stood treat to the crowd. Somehow, I felt almost happy.