We were each given a tin of fruit and a tin of preserved sausages for our Christmas dinner. My pal and I were hungry, so we both opened our tins and ate half the contents for breakfast, putting the remainder in the tin on a shelf in our dugout – covering them with a board with a stone on it. The rats were very bad in the trenches and dugouts. As we were off duty, we went to sleep for a couple of hours and on waking and going to get our dinner found that the rats had knocked off the coverings while we were asleep and had eaten everything. So we had dry biscuits for our Christmas dinner of 1917.