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.
"We are within about sixty yards of the Germans," said Captain P——— at length, after we had gone in and out of the traverses and left the braziers well behind.
Between the spotty, whitish wall of German sandbags, quite distinct in the moonlight, and our parapet were two mounds of sandbags about twenty feet apart. Snug behind one was a German and behind the other an Irishman, both listening. They were within easy bombing range, but the homicidal advantage of position of either resulted in a truce. Sixty yards! Pace it off. It is not far. In other places the enemies have been as close as five yards—only a wall of earth between them. Where a bombing operation ends in an attack, a German is naturally on one side of a traverse and a Briton on the other.