Remembrance, continued.

 "There goes our blinkin' parapet again."

One of the things not commonly known about the life of a soldier in the First World War, (or the Second, or, for that matter to this day) is that very little of their time was taken up with combat or the war itself. Soldiers in the First World War were required to perform eight hours of labour a day, meaning that on top of everything else, being a soldier was a job. Most of the labour was hard, menial tasks- haul supplies, laying down roads, digging trenches and tunnels, and, among the most onerous, filling sandbags to line the tops of trenches and outposts. This labour found its way into much of the cartoons and humour of the period, though in very bleak ways. Belgium was described by some Canadians as being 'half underwater, the other half in sandbags.'. The point of the joke here would be well understood by soldiers who knew that, on top of everything else, their cartoon brothers now had to go and fill and stack more sandbags, again, for the nth time.