He told
me that it was smashed to bits, and began to cry. Then he smudged the
tears away and said:
"I'm lucky enough. I saw many fellows killed."
So it happened, day by day, but the courage of our men endured.
It seemed impossible to newcomers that life could exist at all under
the shell-fire which the Germans flung over our trenches and which we
flung over theirs. So it seemed to the Irish battalions when they held
the lines round Loos, by that Hohenzollern redoubt which was one of
our little hells.
"Things happened," said one of them, "which in other times would have
been called miracles. We all had hairbreadth escapes from death." For
days they were under heavy fire, with 9.2's flinging up volumes of
sand and earth and stones about them. Then waves of poison-gas. Then
trench-mortars and bombs.
"It seemed like years!" said one of the Irish crowd. "None of us
expected to come out alive."
Yet most of them had the luck to come out alive that time, and over a
midday mess in a Flemish farmhouse they had hearty appetites for bully
beef and fried potatoes, washed down by thin red wine and strong black
coffee.
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