This is what a soldier said of the American Ambulance at Neuilly, where he spent four weeks when wounded: "My word, what an 'ospital. Had American millionaires to wait on us. They did it right, too. They're a decent lot, them millionaires. Waited on us 'and an' foot. An' the grub! All French, an' cooked by a real French chef." Another soldier described French tobacco as "something you have to smoke all day to get a smoke." After his first fight with the Germans a soldier who had been through the last Boer war, said; "This is fighting if you like. South Africa was a tea-party to it. The shells go by with a horrible sort of hiss, and then burst with a roar that puts thunder in the shade, and if you are near you probably lose your head and arms, and various portions of your anatomy." Writing of a wound, a sporting soldier said: "The next day, when partridge shooting was beginning at home, sure enough I was 'winged' among the turnips." Another man said that when the shrapnel came it seemed as big as a motor-'bus and to hit him all over. "The shells were like small beer barrels in the air." An Irish soldier wrote: "We charged the Kaiser's crush with a yell that would have put the fear of death into the heart of the most stoical, and with our bayonets we dug them out of their trenches, same as you'd dig bully beef out of a can." An Irish soldier remarked to an interviewer when asked what the war was like: "There ain't anything to talk about. It's fight, an' march, an' fight again, with maybe a crack on the 'ead once in a while. It is the biggest rifle meeting I ever saw--Bisley isn't in it." The rain that fell in September in the trenches, he said, was so heavy that it was like as if the earth had been turned upside down and water had been poured in at the other side. Another remark was that he had slept so much in odd places that now he thought he could sleep on a clothes-line. Another soldier who slept in odd places was Lance-Corporal Waller, of the 4th Royal Fusiliers: "I have slept with strange company since I came out. One night with sheep, another in a schoolroom, once on top of a pigsty, once in a manger, in several ditches, in a first-class drawing-room, in 4 inches of snow, behind the counter of a café, and in a feather bed." A gunner thus described the work of his battery: "We just rained shells on the Germans until we were deaf and choking. I don't think a gun on the position could have sold for old iron after we had finished, and the German gunners would be just odd pieces of clothing and bits of accoutrement."