irrational dislike of the Irish, and he always blamed anything on them if he could. He wouldn’t even admit that Ireland was an agricultural country, and since the Easter Rebellion in Dublin it wasn’t safe to show him a bottle of Irish whisky. “I’ve never met an Irishman with any more sense than that mouse!” he exclaimed. A mouse was standing on its head in the sugar-basin, which was made of metal and contained soft sugar. He eyed the mouse morosely, as though accusing it of Irish ancestry. “This time three nights ago my wife and I were having dinner at the Café Royal. Upstairs at the Café Royal—best food in London, and as good as ever even now. I tell you, Kangar, it’s too much of a bloody contrast, coming back to all this.” There was a muffled Wump and both candles went out. Something heavy had burst outside our door. Lighting the candles, I thought I’d just as soon be upstairs as down in this musty limbo. In about an hour I should be out with the wiring-party, dumping concertina wire in the shell-holes along the edge of the craters. I wondered if I should ever get a Blighty wound. One of our best officers had been hit last night while out with the wirers. This was Bill Eaves, who had been a Classical Scholar at Cambridge and had won medals there for writing Greek and Latin epigrams. Now he’d got a nice bullet wound in the shoulder, with the muscles damaged enough to keep him in England several months. And two nights ago Ormand and a Sandhurst boy named Harris had been hit while on a working party. Ormand’s was a “cushy” shell splinter; but Harris had got his knee smashed up, and the doctor said he would probably be out of the war for good. It was funny to think of young Harris being hit in the first twenty-four hours of his first tour of trenches.
Anyhow we were due for Divisional Rest, which would take us to the back area for three weeks, and the clogging monotony of life in the line would be cleaned out of our minds. And you never knew—perhaps the war would end in those three weeks. The troops were beginning to need a rest badly, for most of them had been doing tours of trenches ever since the end of January, and even when we were at Morlancourt there was a