ve
nothing else to do and when we've got something to do. We get eggs
up here--a fine man is Lord Kitchener--yes, sir, eggs up here in the
trenches!"

When they seemed to think that I was sceptical, he produced some
eggs in evidence.

"And if ye'll not have the bacon, ye'll have a drop of tea. Mind now,
while your tongue is trying to be polite, your stomach is calling your
tongue a liar!"

Wouldn't I have a souvenir? Out came German bullets and buckles
and officers' whistles and helmets and fragments of shells and
German diaries.

"It's easy to get them out there where the Germans fell that thick!" I
was told. "And will ye look at this and take it home to give your pro-
German Irish in America, to show what their friends are shooting at
the Irish? I found them mesilf on a dead German."

He passed me a clip of German bullets with the blunt ends instead of
the pointed ends out. The change is readily made, for the German
bullet is easily pulled out of the cartridge case and the pointed end
thrust against the powder. Thus fired, it goes accurately four or five
hundred yards, which is more than the average distance between
German and British trenches. When it strikes flesh the effect is that of
a dum-dum and worse; for the jacket splits into slivers, which spread
through the pulpy mass caused by the explosion. A leg or an arm
thus hit must almost invariably be amputated. I am not suggesting
that this is a regular practice with German soldiers, but it shows what
wickedness is in the power of the sinister one.

"But ye'll take the tea," said the sergeant, "with a little rum hot in it.
'Twill take the chill out of your bones."

"What if I haven't a chill in my bones?"

"Maybe it's there without speaking to ye and it will be speaking before
an hour longer--or afther ye're home between the sheets with the
rheumatiz, and yell be saying, 'Why didn't I take that glass?' which
I'm holding out to ye this minute, steaming its invitation to be drunk."

It was a memorable drink. Snatches of brogue followed me from the
brazier's glow when I insisted that I must be going.

Now our breastworks took a turn and we were approaching closer to
the German breastworks. Both lines remained where they had "dug
in" after the counter-attacks which followed the battle had ceased.
Ground is too precious in this siege warfare to yield a foot. Soldiers
become misers of soil. Where the flood is checked there you build
your dam against another