He heard matters discussed there with an outspoken freedom which would have set ears tingling at home; and when he asked how soon it was going to end, was told, "Never, my boy. It's going on for ever and ever." And an irreverent one added, "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen!" "End, my dear fellow? Why should it end?" said still another, waving an old briar at him, with the smoke curling like a flag of truce from the stem. "They've got unlimited supplies to draw upon, and an open road to get 'em in. As fast as we kill 'em they bring in fresh ones. As fast as we knock down their earthworks they build 'em up again----" "Faster!" growled another. "Yes, faster. I don't see why it should not go on till the year 2000--going on as we are. It's not a siege; it's a discipline--a chastisement for our sins: I only wish----" "Hear, hear!" grunted another, who had heard that wish many times before. "What do you wish?" asked Eager. "I wish all the Red-tape and Routine people at home could be driven into the trenches here and kept there for a month. They'd learn a thing or two." "Die . . . never learn," growled the other. "If we'd gone right in when first we got here, it would have been a most enormous saving, even if the cost had been heavy. For some reason we lost the chance, and it's never going to come back. We're like a prize-fighter pummelling away at the other fellow's leg and hoping to break him in time that way. We may tire him out, of course, but its a deuced slow business." "Do they never exchange prisoners?" asked Eager. "We never take any worth exchanging. It's only the ruck we get, and they're mostly dead." "Their boots are the best part of 'em," said the other. "Our men are always better shod after a sortie. Gad! sir, it would have made you blaze to see our fellows--Guardsmen and all--tramping about in mud and snow with no soles to their rotten boots! I hope the man who made 'em will spend his eternity in a snowy hell with raw bare feet!" But one night they were all out in haste, at the sound of heavy and continuous musketry down in the trenches on the left attack; and Eager, tumbling out and rushing on with the rest, found himself where a noncombatant had no right to be. He had gone plunging downwards with the others, in order to see all he could, till he fell bodily into a trench. He picked himself up and joined the stream of men hastening towards the firing, and found himself suddenly in the thick of things--bullets humming venomously past his head, men falling with groans and curses by his side, and a big man, standing just above him on the rough parapet of the trench, shouting to his men to "give it 'em hot with the steel," and meanwhile picking up the biggest stones he could find and hurling them at the oncoming Russians in front.