Crash! A fierce gust of wind sweeps through the trench. Men are lifted from their feet and flung violently to the ground amid showers of earth and stones. There is a brief pause; and then is heard the most unexpected of sounds--not the moaning of pain, but a burst of laughter! Four men of the battalion were playing "Forty-five," a card game beloved of Hibernians, seated under a piece of tarpaulin propped up on poles, as much at their ease as if they lay under a hedge on a Sunday evening in summer at home in Ireland, with only the priest to fear, and he known to be on a sick call at the other side of the parish. The bomb came at the most inopportune moment, just as the fall of the trick was about to be decided. When the card party recovered their senses, the man who held the winning card was found to be wounded. "'Twas the Gerrys--sweet bad luck to them!--that jinked the game that time, boys," he exclaimed. His companions, standing round him, burst into laughter at the remark. Merriment is not uncommon as the shells are bursting. The spectacle of four or five men hurriedly tumbling for shelter into the same "funk hole," a wild whirl of arms and legs, has its absurd side and never fails to excite amusement. The way in which men disentangle themselves from the ruins caused by the explosion is often also grotesque. Racy oddities of character are revealed. One man was buried in the loose earth. His comrades hastened to rescue him, and to cheer him up told him he would be got out next to no time, for Tim Maloney, the biggest as well as the fastest digger in the company was engaged on the job. "I feel that right well," cried the victim, as he spluttered the mud from his mouth. "But I've enough on top of me without him! Pull me out of this from under his feet." There was an explosion close to a man at work repairing the trench. The man was overheard saying to himself, as he turned his back disdainfully to the shell, "Oh, go to blazes, with yez."