This man was neither Irish nor Catholic.
Infinitely touching are the remarks they make, these dear fellows; beautiful sometimes in their unconscious heroism.
“Well, at least,” said the Signorina to a man permanently crippled by shrapnel, saddened by the decision that he could never go back to the front. “At least you know you’ve done your little bit.”
“Ah, but you see, miss,” he answered in all simplicity, “among us the saying goes, no one has really done his little bit till he’s underground.”
“Will you mind going back?” said a rather foolish friend of ours to an exhausted, badly wounded sufferer in a Dublin hospital. He had seen Mons and its horrors, all the brutality of war with little of its concomitant glory. The eyes in his drawn face looked up at her steadily.
“If it’s my dooty, lady, I’m ready to go.”
“I’d give my other leg to go back,” said a maimed lad to Lady ——. He was in a hospital at Lyndhurst, a fair, splendid boy, not yet eighteen.
“Don’t make me too soft, Sister,” pleaded an Irish Fusilier with five bullet wounds in his back, to his kindly nurse in the little convent hospital near here. “I’ve got to finish my job out there.”
At a recent lecture delivered on “Five Months with the British Expeditionary Force”—his own experience—Professor Morgan made use of these remarkable words: “Our men count no cost too high in the service of the nation. They greet death like a friend, and go into battle as to a festival.”
What wonder, then, that there should be such an unshakable spirit of confidence throughout the whole of our army, for with conscience at peace, and eyes fixed on their high ideal, they go forth to fight, knowing that, as a great preacher has said, those who do battle in a just cause already carry the flame of victory on their foreheads.