d too, but Fat was the worst; he also had a comical
little laugh--"Tee hee, tee hee" he would go. We used to go out at
night stringing wire in "No Man's Land"; every now and again Fritz
would sweep the wire with machine gun fire, and directly he started
sweeping we would be down like a flash, and wait till Fritz quit. Fat
would be in a shell hole almost as soon as the first shot was fired,
and would laugh at Bink looking for a hole to hide in. Bink would get
sore; all you could hear was the rat-tat-tat of the machine gun and in
between "Tee hee, tee hee" from Fat as he lay and watched Bink crawling
around looking for a hole. Some of the boys would lie in the hole and
wave their legs in the air hoping to get a bullet through them so that
they could get back to "Blighty," but they were never lucky enough. We
would always lose one or two men on these wiring parties, but we had
very few killed and No. 10's luck still held good. By the way perhaps
you would like to know why we call England "Blighty"--it seems that it
comes from two Hindoo words meaning "My home," and as there were a lot
of Indian soldiers out in France at the beginning of the war and they
were with the regular English troops, I suppose it was passed along
that way--to get a "Blighty" means to get a wound that takes you to
"Blighty." To say that a man has got a "Belgique" means that he is
dead. The boys have different sayings for everything, and they sound
funny unless you know what they mean. "Buckshee" the English troops
call anything that you might have to spare, such as "Have you a
buckshee razor?" meaning "Have you a spare razor?" The word "buckshee"
comes from the Hindoo word "Backsheesh." Well, to continue, the other
boy to come to No. 10 was a freak; how the devil he ever got in the
Army beats me. He was deaf, and when you spoke to him you had to
holler; also, he had a cleft palate so you could hardly understand him
when he spoke, but he was a good man in the line and when he was on
sentry, he was up on the fire-step looking over all the time; only at
night of course. He used to pack along a box of ammunition every night
and do his best to fire the lot before morning. When the scouts were
out as they used to be every night, patrolling "No Man's Land," the
word was passed along in the trench and we would either stop firing or
fire high; desultory fire was always kept up all night. Well, we could
never make McKone understand that the scouts