"Ye had a' must to be too late for tay!"
the voice said from the darkness.
"What does he say?" asked Pryor who was just ahead of me.
"He says that we were almost too late for tea," I replied and stared
hard into the darkness on my left. Figures of men in khaki took form
in the gloom, a bayonet sparkled; some one was putting a lid on a
mess-tin and I could see the man doing it....
"Inniskillings?" I asked.
"That's us." (p. 242)
"Quiet?" I asked, alluding to their life in the trench.
"Not bad at all," was the answer. "A shell came this road an hour
agone, and two of us got hit."
"Killed?"
"Boys, oh! boys, aye," was the answer; "and seven got wounded. Nine of
the best, man, nine of the best. Have another drop of tay?"
At the exit of the tunnel the floor was covered with blood and the
flies were buzzing over it; the sated insects rose lazily as we came
up, settled down in front, rose again and flew back over our heads.
What a feast they were having on the blood of men!
The trenches into which we had come were not so clean as many we had
been in before; although the dug-outs were much better constructed
than those in the British lines, they smelt vilely of something
sickening and nauseous.
A week passed away and we were still in the trenches. Sometimes it
rained, but for the most part the sky was clear and the sun very hot.
The trenches were dug out of the chalk, the world in which we lived
was a world of white and green, white parapet and parados with a (p.
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