Amongst the war-worn, ragged, bronzed and bearded crowd is that identical Paddy who reckoned his uniform the livery of his degradation when he first assumed it. He is as ragged as any Connemara harvester by this time, and as tanned, as plucky, and as impudent in the face of death and hardship as he knows how to stick; and it is he who has brought the news which flutters the spirits of the score of men who are huddled in the trench together, right beneath the gaping embrasure of the Russian guns. It was near midnight, and an extreme languor of fatigue had fallen upon all men when the tattered slip of Hibernian nobility crawled up on hands and knees so as not to expose himself against the sky-line, and dropped into his own place in the trench. He dropped with his feet on the stomach of Sergeant Polson Jervase, who denounced his clumsiness in fair set terms, which came as pat to his lips as if he had rehearsed them for a year. ‘Is that you?’ said Paddy. ‘I beg yer pardon, and be damned to you. And now will ye just listen? D’ye hear the death cry?’ Everybody heard the death cry, filling the air from barely a third of a mile away: the voice of pork at the last agony. ‘The Lord alone knows where it’s come from, but that Mussulman crush down below has got hold of a pig. The devil a ration has been served to them for a month past, and they ought to know what hunger means be this time. But bhoys,’ the speaker went on, with a whispered emphasis, ‘we’re Christian men, I hope, and we can’t dream of allowing those poor infidels to peril their immortal salvation by the eating of strange food. It’s eternal loss to the soul of a Mussulman that puts a knife and fork into a griskin. And I’m proposin’ a work of Christian charity. Have ye got the matayrials for a fire handy?’ One of the men sleepily bade him be damned, and turned over in the mud in a scrap of ragged blanket; but all the rest at the bare suggestion of a meal were wide awake. ‘Sergeant, darlin’, just be giving me half-a-dozen men and we will make an exploitation, and be back in no time with a meal of meat that ought to be good enough for this particular mess from now till New Year’s Day. Is there any chance of a fire now?’ A member of the hungry, hard-bitten band owned a solitary lucifer; but was afraid that the damp had deprived it of all virtue. ‘Hurry up, boys,’ said one. ‘If once those blessed Bazouks get a fork into piggy, we shall have to fight for a share of him.’ ‘We’ve got the makings of a fire here somewhere,’ said the man with the solitary lucifer. ‘But how are we to start it? This brushwood stuff is all wet, and it won’t catch.’