“It is that!” said the sergeant.  “And the hungrier ye are the better.  It’s your nose that’s telling ye so this minute.  I can see that ye’re hungry yoursilf!”

“Then you’re pretty well fed?”

“Well fed, is it?  It’s stuffed we are, like the geese that grow the paty-what-do-you-call-it?  Eating is our pastime.  We eat when we’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 flood.