Facts in the “Times,” November 21, 1916
An old man sat in a tram in great distress. He had lost his boy at the Front. When he joined the Army he had never tasted alcohol, but when he came home on leave to see his mother he was drunk every night. He was drunk the night he went away, and in three days he was dead. “The last we saw of him,” said the poor old man between his sobs, “was his going away drunk, and his mother, who is old-fashioned in her faith, cannot get it out of her mind that no drunkard can enter the Kingdom of God.”
Facts told by Dr. Norman Maclean
Many young officers, called upon to share the wine bill at mess, naturally say, “If I have to pay I may as well drink my share,” and one man accounted for ten glasses of champagne. On a Guest night in his mess several more “were under the table.”
Facts in “Dublin Daily Express,” April 1916.
A boy got his V.C., and came home wounded. The publican in his street sounded his praises in the taproom, where they subscribed to the bar for 120 pints for him when he arrived. He came home and began to drink it, and was nearly dead with it before he was rescued.
Facts related by Bishop of Lincoln
When the Scottish Horse Brigade were at Perth whisky was literally forced down the men, and they were inundated with floods of bad women.
Brigadier-General Lord Tullibardine
A teetotal household had two boys in an officers’ training camp, and they gave pitiable accounts of drinking. Boys from school had a drunken sergeant put over them, and a canteen in the midst of them. “Our boys never saw drink before,” one father wrote.