At dinner an Irish colonel remarked: "I am very annoyed; during my last leave I rented a house for my family, and now my wife writes that it is haunted. The owners really ought to tell one these things."
"Perhaps they did not know it," said our indulgent colonel.
"They knew it very well. When my wife went to complain, they got very confused, and ended by owning up. One of their great-grandmothers has walked from the drawing-room to her old bedroom for the last hundred and fifty years. They tried to excuse themselves by saying she was perfectly harmless. That is possible and I am quite willing to believe it, but it is none the less annoying for my wife. Do you think I can cancel my lease?"
I here risked a sceptical remark, but the whole Mess jumped on me. Irish ghosts are scientific facts.
"But why do phantoms love Irish houses more than others?"
"Because," said the Irish colonel, "we are a very sensitive race and we enter into communication with them more easily."
And he crushed me with technical arguments on wireless telegraphy.
January 15th.
The colonel, having found out this morning that a motor-ambulance was going into Ypres, took me with him. In front of the hospital we found ourselves wedged in by a terrible block of waggons, under a fierce bombardment.
A horse with its carotid artery cut by a bit of shell, and only held up by the shafts, was writhing in agony close by us. The drivers were swearing. Nothing to do but wait patiently in our car, shaken by explosions.