"You must run across that break. Three or four shots at you every time. We're gradually getting shipshape, though." Just then a couple of bullets went singing overhead. The group paid no attention to them. If you paid attention to bullets over the parapet you would have no time for anything else. But these bullets have a way of picking off tall officers who are standing up among their houses. In the course of their talk they happened to speak of such an instance, though not with reference to the two bullets I have mentioned. "Poor S------did not last long. He had been out only three weeks." "How is J------? Hit badly?" "Through the shoulder; not seriously." "H------is back. Recovered very quickly." Normal trench talk, this! A crack which signifies that the bullet has hit --another man down. One grows accustomed to it, and one of this group of officers might be gone to-morrow. "I have one, sir," said Matty, exhibiting a helmet when we returned past his station. "Bullet went right through the head and came out the peak!" It was time that Captain P------ was back to his own command. As we came to his company's line word was just being passed from sentry to sentry: "No firing. Patrols going out." It was midnight now. "We'll go in the other direction," said Captain P------ when he had learned that there was no news. This brought us to an Irish regiment. The Irish naturally had something to say. XVI Nearer The Germans Here not the Irish Sea lay between the broad a and the brogue, but the space between two sentries or between two rifles with bayonets fixed, lying against the wall of the breastworks ready for their owners' hands when called to arms in case of an alarm. One stepped from England into Ireland; and my prediction that the Irish would have something to say was correct. The first man who made his presence felt was a good six feet in height, with a heavy moustache and the earpieces of his cap tied under his chin, though the night was not cold. He placed himself fairly in front of me in the narrow path back of the breastworks and he looked a cowled and sinister figure in the faint glow from a brazier. I certainly did not want any physical argument with a man of his build. "Who are you?" he demanded, as stiffly as if I had broken in at the veranda window with a jemmy. For the nearer you come to the front, the more you feel that you are in the way. You are a stray extra piece of baggage; a dead human weight. Everyone is doing something definite as a part of the machine except yourself; and in your civilian clothes you feel the self- conscious conspicuousness of appearing on a dancing-floor in a dressing-gown. Captain P------was a little way back in another passage. I was alone and in a rough tweed suit--a strange figure in that world of khaki and rifles.