voice:

"'Two hours! My God, suppose it only took that time to get home!"

"It 'ud be a sight easier to 'ang on 'ere," said the R.E. Reserve man who
acted as gunner's mate, "if there was such a thing as a plug o' baccy to
be 'ad. Wot gives me the reg'lar sick is to see them well-fed Dutchies
chawin' an' blowin', blowin' an' chawin', from mornin' till night----" He
spat disgustedly.

"When honust men," groaned Kildare, "would swop a year av life for a twist
av naygurhead. Wirra-wirra!"

There was a dry and mirthless laugh, showing teeth, white or discoloured,
in haggard and bristly faces. Then a short young Corporal, who had been
leaning back in an angle of the earthwork, hugging his sharp knees and
staring at nothing in particular with pale-coloured, ugly, honest eyes,
grew painfully crimson through his crust of sun-tan and grime, and said
something that made the lean bodies in ragged, filthy tan-cord and
dilapidated khaki, or torn and muddy tweed, slew round upon the unclean
straw on which they squatted. All eyes, were they hunger-dull or
fever-bright, sought the Corporal's face.

"Dessay you'll think me a greedy 'ound," said the Corporal, with a painful
effort that set the prominent Adam's apple in his lean throat jerking,
"when you tyke in wot I've got to s'y. It makes me want to git into me own
pocket and 'ide, to 'ave to tell it. For me an' you, we've shared an'
shared alike, wotever we 'ad, while we 'ad anythink--except in one
partic'lar." The Adam's apple jumped up and down as he gulped. He was
burning crimson now to the roots of his ragged, light-brown hair, and the
tips of his flat-rimmed, jutting ears, and the patch of thin bare chest
that showed where his coarse grey back shirt was unbuttoned at the neck.

All those eyes, feverishly bright or sickly dull, watched him as he put
his hand into the bulging breast-pocket, and slowly fished out a shining
brown briar-root with a stem unchewed as yet by any smoker.

"Twig this 'ere noo pipe. It was sent me by a--by a friend, along of a
packet of 'Oneydew, for a--for a kind o' birthday present." His voice
wobbled strangely; there was scalding water dammed up behind his ugly
honest eyes. "She--she bin an' opened the packet and filled the pipe, an'
I shared out the 'Oneydew in the trenches as far as it went, but I bin an'
kep' the pipe, sayin' to myself I'd smoke it when she lighted it wiv 'er
own 'ands, an' not--not before. Next day we"--the Adam's apple went u