sitive_" to the touch. It was
only after movement returned that I was quite sure it was Irish! For
ever since then the Home Rule controversy has been going on in my body,
for when I want to place my foot in a certain position, it's bound to
try and go some other way. You can see from all this that I don't know
much about nerves, and I even wonder sometimes whether, if they put in
my leg a nerve from an arm, I might not try to shake hands with it like
the armless man in the circus, or, if it happened to belong to the
opposite leg, whether or not I would be pigeon-toed.

I sometimes wonder if the donor of this piece of nerve still "feels it"
in his own leg, for, months after a man has lost his leg, he still
feels it there. There was one man in the hospital who had lost both
legs and screamed with pain every night because his toes were twisted,
and it was only when they had dug up his feet and straightened out his
toes that he got rest.

There are nerves and _nerves_, and I am sure that the grafting in me of
this piece from the _nerves_ of an Irishman has given to me more
_nerve_ than I ever had in my life before, else how could I have
written this book?

PART VI

MEDITATIONS IN THE TRENCHES

CHAPTER XXXII

THE RIGHT INFANTRY WEAPONS

I know scores of men who have been months in the trenches and over the
top in several attacks who have never fired a shot out of their rifles.
In fact, it is very, very rarely that the man in the trenches gets a
chance to aim at an enemy at a greater range than a hundred yards.
There are thousands of men whom I know who believe that the long-range
rifles used in our army to-day are useless weapons. A much more
serviceable gun to repel a counter-attack would be one firing buckshot
like a pump-gun. The bullets from our high-velocity rifles frequently
pass through the body of a man at a close range and he is not even
conscious of having been hit and continues to come on with as great
fury as before. The pellets scattering from a shotgun at a range of a
hundred yards or less would do him more damage and be far more certain
to stop him. In an actual charge our present rifle is more than
useless--it is an encumbrance, and when at grips with the enemy in his
own trenches it is often a fatal handicap. With a bayonet at the end
it is far too long, and in a trench two to four feet wide it cannot be
used with much effect. I have known our men repeatedly to unship the
bayo