The boy groaned again. He was suffering intolerable agony, and, grasping a strap, hauled himself up a little with a wet sweat breaking out on his forehead.
Another boy came along alone, with one hand in a big bandage. He told me that it was smashed to bits, and began to cry. Then he smudged the tears away and said:
“I'm lucky enough. I saw many fellows killed.”
So it happened, day by day, but the courage of our men endured.
It seemed impossible to newcomers that life could exist at all under the shell-fire which the Germans flung over our trenches and which we flung over theirs. So it seemed to the Irish battalions when they held the lines round Loos, by that Hohenzollern redoubt which was one of our little hells.
“Things happened,” said one of them, “which in other times would have been called miracles. We all had hairbreadth escapes from death.” For days they were under heavy fire, with 9.2's flinging up volumes of sand and earth and stones about them. Then waves of poison-gas. Then trench-mortars and bombs.
“It seemed like years!” said one of the Irish crowd. “None of us expected to come out alive.”
Yet most of them had the luck to come out alive that time, and over a midday mess in a Flemish farmhouse they had hearty appetites for bully beef and fried potatoes, washed down by thin red wine and strong black coffee.
Round Ypres, and up by Boesinghe and Hooge—you remember Hooge?—the 14th, 20th, and 6th Divisions took turns in wet ditches and in shell-holes, with heavy crumps falling fast and roaring before they burst like devils of hell. On one day there were three hundred casualties in one battalion The German gun-fire lengthened, and men were killed on their way out to “rest”—camps to the left of the road between Poperinghe and Vlamertinghe.
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