I went up the ladder after them⁠—it was very shaky in the middle⁠—and, putting my head through the loft, gave a greeting to a number of dark figures lying in the same kind of straw that I had smelled downstairs. One boy was sitting with his back to the beams, playing a penny whistle very softly to himself, or perhaps to the rats under the straws.

“The craytures are that bold,” said a boy from County Cork, “that when we first came in they sat up smilin’ and sang ‘ God Save Ireland .’ Bedad, and it’s the truth I’m after tellin’ ye.”

The billets were wet and dirty. But it was good to be away from the shells, even if the rain came through the beams of a broken roof and soaked through the plaster of wattle walls. The Irish boys were good at making wood fires in these old barns and pigsties, if there were a few bricks about to make a hearth, and, sure, a baked potato was no Protestant with a grudge against the Pope.