Orange and Green
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.
[XVI. STORIES OF SACRIFICE]
What have I done for you,
England, my England?
What is there I would not do,
England, my own?
W. E. Henley’s “For England’s Sake.”
Soldier, soldier, if by shot and shell
They wound him, my dear lad, my sweetheart O,
He’ll lie bleeding in the rain
And call me, all in vain,
Crying for the fingers of his sweetheart O.
Maurice Hewlett’s “Soldier, Soldier.”
Give them a cigarette and let them grip the operating-table, and they will stick anything until they practically collapse: Corpl. H. Stewart, Royal Army Medical Corps.