"When I git into Germany," says Tommy, "I mean to lay hands on all I can git! I'm goin' to loot off them Germans, like they looted off them pore Beljins!"
"Surely you wouldn't be like the Crown Prince," says the old lady, and we all wake up to the fact then that she's really a delightful old lady, for only a delightful old lady could put the case as neatly as that.
"Shure, all I care about," says the big, quiet Irishman in the corner, "is to sleep and sleep and sleep!"
"On a bed," says the wounded one. "Good lor! Think of it! To-night I'll sleep in a bed. I'll roll over and over to make sure I'm there. Think of it, sheets, blankets. We don't even get a blanket in the trenches. We might get too comfortable and go to sleep."
"What about the little oil stoves the newspapers say you're having?" asks the old lady.
"We've seen none of them!" assert the soldiers three.
"Divil a one of them," adds the Irishman.
"I've eat things I never eat before," says Tommy suddenly, in his simple way that is so curiously telling. "I've eat raw turnips out of the fields. They're all eatin' raw turnips over there. And I've eat sweets. I've eat pounds of chocolates if I could get them and I've never eat them before in my life sinst I was a kid."
"Oh, chocolates!" says the wounded one, ecstatically. "But chocolate in the sheet--thick, wide, heavy chocolate--there's nothing on earth like it! I wrote home, and put all over my letters, Chocolate, _chocolate_, CHOCOLATE. They sent me out tons of it. But I never got it. It went astray, somewhere or other."
"But they're very good to us," says Tommy earnestly. "We don't want for nothin'. You couldn't be better treated than what we are!"
"What do you like most to receive?" asks the old lady.
"Chocolate," they all answer simultaneously.
"The other night at Ypres," says Tommy with his usual unexpectedness, "a German came out of his trenches. He shouted: 'German waiter! want to come back to the English. Please take me prisoner.' We didn't want no German waiters. We can't be bothered takin' the beggars prisoners. We let go at him instead!"
"They eat like savages!" puts in the Irishman. "I've see them shovelling their food in with one hand and pushing it down with the other. 'Tis my opinion the Germans have got no throats!"