Mick Clancy is that droll with his larking and bamboozling the Germans
that he makes us nearly split our sides laughing at him and his ways.
Yesterday he got a stick and put a cap on it so that it peeped above
the trenches just like a man, and then the Germans kept shooting away
at it until they must have used up tons of ammunition, and there was
us all the time laughing at them. Tommy McQuiston, the big sergeant
from the Black North, does nothing else morning, noon, and night but
talk about Ned Carson and what he and his volunteers will do when they
come out to fight the Germans. He has to put up with a lot of banter
and back chat from us on the quiet in the sergeants’ mess, but, sure,
though he’s mad Orange, he knows as well as anyone that we think no
less of him for that. To get his dander up we tell him he’s going to be
the door porter in the Dublin Parliament when the war’s over; but he
never begrudges us our bit of diversion and devilment, and says more
like he’ll end his days as a warder in a convict prison in charge of
us: _Sergeant T. Cahill_.