ench was roofed with heavy pit-props and sandbags
proof against any shrapnel fire. It was an easy trench to march in,
and we needed all the ease possible. The sweat poured from every pore,
down our faces, our arms and legs, our packs seemed filled with lead,
our haversacks rubbing against our hips felt like sand paper; the
whole march was a nightmare. The water we carried got hot in our
bottles and became almost undrinkable. In the reserve trench we got
some tea, a godsend to us all.

We had just stepped into a long, dark, pit-prop-roofed tunnel and (p. 241)
the light of the outer world made us blind. I shuffled up against a
man who was sitting on one side, righted myself and stumbled against
the knees of another who sat on a seat opposite.

"Will ye have a wee drop of tay, my man?" a voice asked, an Irish
voice, a voice that breathed of the North of Ireland. I tried to see
things, but could not. I rubbed my eyes and had a vision of an arm
stretching towards me; a hand and a mess tin. I drank the tea
greedily.

"There's a lot of you ones comin' up," the voice said. "You ones!" How
often have I said "You ones," how often do I say it still when I'm too
excited to be grammatical. "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
sicke