But it is not all comedy and farce. How could it be with stern, black-visaged Death always watching with wolfish eyes to see men die? Fate plays unimaginable tricks with its victims. A bullet stops many a casual conversation for ever. "Look at this!" cries a man, holding up his cap for a comrade to see the bullet-hole that had just been made through it. "A close shave," he adds; "but what matter? Isn't a miss as good as a mile?" And, as he was putting the cap on again, he fell a corpse to a surer bullet. There he lay, just a bundle of muddy khaki; and a dozing comrade, upon whom he dropped, elbowed him aside, saying impatiently, "Get out of that, with yer andrew-martins" (jokes and tricks); "can't you let a poor divil get a wink of sleep?" Tragedy takes on, at times, queer, fantastic shapes. A man has his right arm blown off close to the shoulder. He picks the limb up with his left hand, shouting, "My arm! my arm! Oh, holy mother of God, where's my arm?" In raging agony he rushes shrieking down the trench carrying the limb with him until he encounters his company officer. "Oh, captain, darlin'," he cries. "Look what the Gerrys have done to me! May God's curse light upon them and theirs for ever! An' now I'll never shoulder a rifle for poor ould Ireland any more." The night, and only the night, has terrors for the Irish soldiers, especially those from the misty mountains and remote seaboard of the west and south. In the daylight they are merry and prolific of jest. Strongly gregarious by instinct, they delight in companionship. They are sustained and upheld by the excitement of battle's uproar. They will face any danger in the broad daylight. But they hate to be alone in the dark anywhere, and are afraid to pass at night even a graveyard in which their own beloved kith and kin lie peacefully at rest for ever. They feel "lonesome and queer" as they would say themselves. So it is that when by himself at a listening post in a shell hole in No Man's Land, lapped about with intense blackness, peering and hearkening, the superstitious soul of the Irish soldier seems to conjure up all the departed spectral bogies and terrors of the Dark Ages. He is ready to cry out like Ajax, the Greek warrior, in "Homer," "Give us but light, O Jove; and in the light, if thou seest fit, destroy us."