It's funny how some men meet death, anyway. We had one nigger prize fighter along with us named Bob Scanlon. He was the blackest coon you ever saw, until one day there came a great big "marmite" that burst almost on top of him and buried him in the mud. We dug him out, and he wasn't even scratched, but ever afterward he has been a kind of mulatto color, he was so darned scared by the narrowness of his escape.
Another boy, an Englishman, got out of the trench one day to stretch his legs, as he said he was tired of sitting still. Some one called to him to come down and not be a fool, as the Germans were keeping up a constant rifle fire, and after a minute or two he jumped back into the trench. "They didn't get you, did they?" called out some one. "Oh, no!" he answered, sitting down. Then all of a sudden he just keeled over slowly sideways without a sound, and, believe me, when they went to pick him up he was as dead as David--plugged clean through the heart. He never even felt the shock of it. If they do ever get me, that's the way I hope to die.
FRENCHMAN MEETS THAT STRANGE BEING, TOMMY ATKINS.
LATTER'S UN-FRENCH WAYS AMUSINGLY DEPICTED BY PARISIAN JOURNALIST FOR HIS READERS.
The thousands of English soldiers now on French soil are, to Frenchmen, strange, exotic creatures, the study of which is full of delightful surprises. Recently a French journalist traveled to the trenches, interviewed several specimens of the genus Tommy Atkins, and published the results in a Paris newspaper.
One Tommy was "of the species crane," with thin legs and arms like telegraph wires, by no means as taciturn as the Frenchman had believed Englishmen to be. He told the Frenchman some tall yarns.
"In one fight our battalion lost five hundred men," he vouchsafed. "One bullet, which just scratched my nose, killed my pal beside me."
Another Tommy dwelt on the awful fact that he had been "twenty-two days on water without any tea in it." He, too, had been in the thick of the fray and had killed several of the enemy with his own hand, which, recounts the Frenchman, filled him with "a gentle joy."
"Are the inhabitants of this part of France hospitable?" the journalist inquired of another Englishman.
"Awfully nice!" replied the soldier. These words the correspondent, after giving them in English, to show how strange they look, translates: "Terriblement aimable"--a combination which must appear perfectly incomprehensible to Frenchmen, who do not see how a thing can be "awful" and "nice" at the same time.