“We are all beat up after four days of the hardest soldiering you ever dreamt of,” Private Patrick McGlade says in a letter to his mother. “I am glad to say we accounted for our share of the Germans. We tried hard to get at them many a time, but they never would wait for us when they saw the bright bits of steel at the business end of our rifles. Some of them squeal like the pigs on killing day when they see the steel ready. Some of our finest lads are now sleeping their last sleep in Belgium, but, mother dear, you can take your son’s word for it that for every son of Ireland who will never come back there are at least three Germans who will never be heard of again. When we got here we sang ‘Paddies Evermore,’ and then we were off to chapel to pray for the souls of the lads that are gone.”
“Some of us feel very strongly about being sent home for scratches that will heal,” writes Corporal A. Hands. “Don’t believe half the stories about our hardships. I haven’t seen or heard of a man who made complaint of anything. You can’t expect a six-course dinner on active service, but we get plenty to fight on.”
Cases of personal pluck were so common that we soon ceased to take notice of them, a wounded driver in the Royal Artillery told an interviewer. “There was a man of the Buffs, who carried a wounded chum for over a mile under German fire, but if you suggested a Victoria Cross for that man he would punch your head, and as he is a regular devil when roused the men say as little as they can about it. He thinks he didn’t do anything out of the common, and doesn’t see why his name should be dragged into the papers over it. Another case I heard of was a corporal of the Fusilier Brigade—I don’t know his regiment—who held a company of Germans at bay for two hours by the old trick of firing at them from different points, and so making them think they had a crowd to face. He was getting on very well until a party of cavalry outflanked him, as you might say, and as they were right on top of him there was no kidding about his ‘strength,’ so he skedaddled, and the Germans took the position he had held so long. He got back to his mates all right, and they were glad to see him, for they had given him up for dead.”
“No regiment fought harder than we did, and no regiment has better officers, who went shoulder to shoulder with their men,” says a non-commissioned officer of the Buffs, writing from hospital, “but you can’t expect absolute impossibilities to be accomplished, no matter how brave the boys are, when you are fighting a force from twenty to thirty times as strong. If some of you at home who have spoken sneeringly of British officers could have seen how they handled their men and shirked nothing you would be ashamed of yourselves. We are all determined when fit again to return and get our own back.”
Everywhere you find that the one cry of the soldiers who are invalided home—they are impatient to be cured quickly and get back “to have another slap at them.” We know how our women here at home share that eager enthusiasm in this the most righteous war Britain has ever gone into; and isn’t there something that stirs you like the sound of a trumpet in such a passage as this from the letter a Scottish nun living in Belgium has written to her mother?
“I am glad England is aroused, and that the British lion is out with all his teeth showing. Here these little lions of Belgians are raging mad and doing glorious things.
“Tell father I am cheery, and feel sometimes far too warlike for a nun. That’s my Scottish blood. I hope to goodness the Highlanders, if they come, will march down another street on their way to the caserne, or I shall shout and yell and cheer them, and forget I mustn’t look out of the window.”
An extract from Sergeant T. Cahill’s letter to his friends at Bristol gives you a snap-shot of our women in the firing line, and of the fearless jollity and light-heartedness with which our Irish comrades meet the worst that their enemies can do:
“The Red Cross girleens, with their purty faces and their sweet ways, are as good men as most of us, and better than some of us. They are not supposed to venture into the firing line at all, but they get there all the same, and devil the one of us durst turn them away,” and he goes on casually, “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.”
But I think there is perhaps nothing in these letters that is more touching or more finely significant than this: