"They eat like savages!" puts in the Irishman. "I've see them shovelling their food in with one hand and pushing it down with the other. 'Tis my opinion the Germans have got no throats!"
"The Germans have lots to eat," asserts Tommy. "Whenever we capture them we always find them well stocked. Brown bread. They always have brown bread, and bully beef, and raisins."
"Beasts!" says the wounded one again. "But good lor, their Jack Johnsons! When I think of them now I can't believe it at all. They're like fifty shells a minute sometimes. Sometimes in the middle of all the inferno I'd think I was dead; or in hell. I often thought that."
"Them guns cawst them a lot," says Tommy. "It cawst £250 each loading. We used to be laying there in the trenches and to pass the time while they was firing at us we'd count up how much it was cawsting them. That's 17s. 6d., that bit of shrapnel! we'd say. And there goes another £5! They waste their shells something terrible too. There's thirty five-pound notes gone for nothing we'd reckon up sometimes when thirty shells had exploded in nothin' but mud!"
Then the wounded one tells us a funny story.
"I was getting messages in one day when this came through: 'The Turks are wearing fez and neutral trousers!' We couldn't make head or tail of the neutral trousers! So we pressed for an explanation. It came. 'The Turks are wearing fez, breaches of neutrality!'"
And while we are laughing the train runs into Victoria Station and the soldiers three leap joyously out into the rain-wet London night.
Then dear familiar words break on our ears, in a woman's voice.
"Any luggage, Mum!" says a woman porter.