I left our party and went around among them and, to
my great satisfaction, found, as I had been pretty sure I would, a
number of old acquaintances and old admirers who came crowding around
me to shake hands. I made a great collection of souvenirs here, for
they insisted on pressing trophies upon me.
"Tak them, Harry," said one after another. "We can get plenty more
where they came from!"
One laddie gave me a helmet with a bullet hole through the skip, and
another presented me with one of the most interesting souvenirs of
all I carried home from France. That was a German sniper's outfit. It
consisted of a suit of overalls, waterproofed. If a man had it on he
would be completely covered, from head to foot, with just a pair of
slits for his eyes to peep out of, and another for his mouth, so that
he could breathe. It was cleverly painted the color of a tree--part
of it like the bark, part green, like leaves sprouting from it.
"Eh, Jock," I asked the laddie who gave it to me. "A thing like yon's
hard to be getting, I'm thinking?"
"Oh, not so very hard," he answered, carelessly. "You've got to be a
good shot." And he wore medals that showed he was! "All you've got to
do, Harry, is to kill the chap inside it before he kills you! The
fellow who used to own that outfit you've got hid himself in the fork
of a tree, and, as you may guess, he looked like a branch of the tree
itself. He was pretty hard to spot.
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