For trench-digging, for hut-building, for the making and repair of roads and railways, for the handling and unloading of supplies and ammunition, for sanitation, salvage, moving the wounded at casualty clearing stations, and a score of other needs, the demand on the Labour battalions grew and grew.
How well I remember the shivering Kaffir boys and Indians at work on the handling of stores and ammunition in the cold spring of 1917!--and the navvy battalions on the roads before the Chinese had arrived in force, and before the great rush of German prisoners began.

Between the British navvy battalions, many of them elderly men past military age, or else unfit in some way for the fighting line, and their comrades in the trenches, there were generally the friendliest relations.

The fighting man knew well what he owed to the "old boys." I have before me an account by a Highland officer of the relation between a navvy and a regular battalion in the Ypres salient.

"Their huts stretched along the side of the road which led us towards our trenches; and every time we passed that way the sound of the pipes would bring them out of their billets in crowds to cheer us in, or to welcome us back if we were returning.

They kept that road in splendid repair, despite the heavy wear and tear of the endless traffic which used it, and we blessed them many times.