Corporal F. Leeming, R.F.A., wrote to his wife: "I am all right, but still have to keep ducking every time a 'messenger from the Kaiser' comes whistling round. It is not exactly like throwing eggs about when their shells burst. They make a hole in the ground about 20 feet across, and the noise is terrible and nerve-racking. You feel pretty shaky at first." According to Private Thomas Mulholland, Highland Light Infantry, shells were not as much appreciated at a dance as ladies would have been: "In the trenches last week we held a dance, for want of something better to do. Of course, the only partners were fellow-soldiers; but still it was a change from the monotony of shell fire. Not that the shells were absent, for just when we had settled down to enjoy the jigging the enemy began to worry us with shrapnel. The shells burst all around, and one burst in the middle of a little group of men giving a Gaelic four-hand reel. Every man was killed. After that we thought it best to stop." Afternoon tea under fire was like this: "The mugs were passed round with the biscuits and the 'bully' as best they could by the mess orderlies, but it was hard work messing without getting more than we wanted. My next-door neighbour, so to speak, got a shrapnel bullet in his tin, and another two doors off had his biscuit shot out of his hand. Private Plant had a cigarette shot out of his mouth, and a comrade got a bullet into his tin of bully beef. 'It saves the trouble of opening it,' was his remark." One day a shell smashed a breakfast porridge pot, and another scattered a dinner of stew. "We cursed more about that stew than if we had been hit ourselves." "It beats Banagher," said a jocular private in the Royal Irish, "how these Germans always disturb us at meal times. I suppose it's just the smell of the bacon that they're after. They seem to look for a blooming Ritz Hotel in the firing line." Men can even sleep when under fire. "It is a most extraordinary thing," said an officer to _The Daily Telegraph_ special correspondent, "to see soldiers lying on their straw soundly asleep when German shells are bursting all round them. Men keep on snoring even after a shell has burst within 5 or 6 yards over their heads and half filled their trenches with fresh earth. One gets so used to the firing, that, though it may sound incredible, it soon becomes far less noticeable than city traffic, for instance." CHAPTER XIII "I've Got It" Sometimes a man after being under fire for a considerable time without being wounded begins to fancy that he has a charmed life and that he is "not for it," as soldiers say. Still, if he is to be a billet for a bullet the bullet will in its own time find him out. Then, he who has been seeing comrades falling on either side of him will find this a more personal matter, an affair of his only. When the end comes to a poor fellow he is generally gone to "another place" before he knows he is dead--as an Irish soldier said.