The corkscrews he is carrying are why the set has its odd name. The French called them queue de cochon — pig's tail — and the British Army called them corkscrew pickets: a steel bar with its bottom end wound into a spiral, and three eyes up the shaft to thread the wire through. They arrived around 1915 to replace timber posts, and the spiral is the whole point. You screw a picket into the ground by turning it. You hammer a post in — and hammering at night in no man's land brings the machine guns. Every part of the shape of this thing is an argument for silence.

Two men, and neither has a hand free for a rifle. One is bent double under a roll of wire slung on a stake; the other has the pickets over his shoulder and more in his fist, corkscrews swinging. This is what a work party was: men sent out after dark to put the wire back where the shelling had taken it, and out again the next night, and the night after that. In a diorama, walk them out of a trench section into no man's land, and set the MG08 team across the way, listening for the sound they are trying not to make.

W. Britain model 23113. 1/30 scale (approximately 60mm), matte-painted metal. Two-piece set on separate sculpted groundwork bases. Limited edition of 400 sets. Boxed.