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t sprung up as I came in be the door. "Immediately I had him by the big toe. 'Hands up, Hans'! I said, and he didn't argue, all that he did was to swear like one of ourselves and flop down. 'Why don't ye bury yer sausages, Hans?' I asked (p. 079) him. 'I smelt yer, me bucko, by what ye couldn't eat. Why didn't ye have something better than water in yer bottle?' I says to him. Dang a Christian word would he answer, only swear, an swear with nothin' bar the pull of me finger betwixt him and his Maker. But, ye know, I had a kind of likin' for him when I thought of him comin' in to my house without as much as yer leave, and going to sleep just as if he was in his own home. I didn't swear back at him but just said, 'This is only a house for wan, but our King has a big residence for ye, so come along before it gets any clearer,' and I took him over to our trenches as stand-to was coming to an end." Referring again to our trenches there is one portion known to me where the lines are barely fifty yards apart, and at the present time the grass is hiding the enemy's trenches; to peep over the parapet gives one the impression of looking on a beautiful meadow splashed with daisy, buttercup, and poppy flower; the whole is a riot of colour--crimson, heliotrope, mauve, and green. What a change from some weeks ago! Then the place was littered with dead bodies, and limp, (p. 080) lifeless figures hung on to the barbed wire where they had been caught in a mad rush to the trenches which they never took. A breeze blows across the meadow as I write, carrying with it the odour of death and perfumed flowers, of aromatic herbs and summer, of desolation and decay. It is good that Nature does her best to blot out all traces of the tragedy between the trenches. There is a vacant spot in our lines, where there is no trench and none being constructed; why this should be I do not know. But all this ground is under machine-gun fire and within rifle range. No foe would dare to cross the open, and the foe who dared would never live to get through. Further to the right, is a pond with a dead German stuck there, head down, and legs up in air. They tell me that a concussion shell has struck him since and part of his body was blown over to our lines. At present the pond is hidden and the light and shade plays over the kindly grasses that circle round it. On the extreme right there is a graveyard. The trench is deep in dead men's bones and is cons
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