the spirits of the score of men who are
huddled in the trench together, right beneath the gaping embrasure of
the Russian guns.

It was near midnight, and an extreme languor of fatigue had fallen upon
all men when the tattered slip of Hibernian nobility crawled up on hands
and knees so as not to expose himself against the sky-line, and dropped
into his own place in the trench. He dropped with his feet on the
stomach of Sergeant Polson Jervase, who denounced his clumsiness in fair
set terms, which came as pat to his lips as if he had rehearsed them for
a year.

'Is that you?' said Paddy. 'I beg yer pardon, and be damned to you. And
now will ye just listen? D'ye hear the death cry?'

Everybody heard the death cry, filling the air from barely a third of a
mile away: the voice of pork at the last agony.

'The Lord alone knows where it's come from, but that Mussulman crush
down below has got hold of a pig. The devil a ration has been served to
them for a month past, and they ought to know what hunger means be this
time. But bhoys,' the speaker went on, with a whispered emphasis,
'we're Christian men, I hope, and we can't dream of allowing those poor
infidels to peril their immortal salvation by the eating of strange
food. It's eternal loss to the soul of a Mussulman that puts a knife and
fork into a griskin. And I'm proposin' a work of Christian charity. Have
ye got the matayrials for a fire handy?'

One of the men sleepily bade him be damned, and turned over in the mud
in a scrap of ragged blanket; but all the rest at the bare suggestion
of a meal were wide awake. 'Sergeant, darlin', just be giving me
half-a-dozen men and we will make an exploitation, and be back in
no time with a meal of meat that ought to be good enough for this
particular mess from now till New Year's Day. Is there any chance of a
fire now?'

A member of the hungry, hard-bitten band owned a solitary lucifer; but
was afraid that the damp had deprived it of all virtue.

'Hurry up, boys,' said one. 'If once those blessed Bazouks get a fork
into piggy, we shall have to fight for a share of him.'

'We've got the makings of a fire here somewhere,' said the man with the
solitary lucifer. 'But how are we to start it? This brushwood stuff is
all wet, and it won't catch.'

But one man was there with a providential scrap of newspaper. There was
a moon in the frosty sky, with tatters of windy cloud about it, which
gave light enough to show the men each o