“More than enough,” said Kentucky gravely. “I’m not going because I like it, any more than I did in the first place. It’s just because I think I ought to play out the game.”
“God,” said Larry. “As if you hadn’t done enough. You’ve got your discharge as unfit. Who would ever blame you for not going back, or dream you ought to go?”
“Only one man,” said Kentucky with the glimmer of a smile, “but one that counts a smart lot with me; and he’s—myself.”
“But it’s nonsense,” said Larry desperately. “Why, it’s not even as if you were one of us. After all, you’re American, and this country has no claim, never had a claim, on you. You’ve done more than your share already. There isn’t an earthly reason why you should go again.”
“Not even one of us,” repeated Kentucky softly. “Well, now, haven’t I earned the right to call myself one of you? No, never mind; course I know you didn’t mean it that way. But you’re wrong otherwise, boy. I’m not an American now. If you folks went to war with America to-morrow, and I was fit to fight, I’d have to fight on your side. There was an oath I took to serve your King, when I enlisted, you’ll remember.”
“No one would expect an oath like that to bind you to fight against your own people,” said Larry quickly.
“In Kentucky, boy,” said Kentucky gently, his speech running, as it always did when he was stirred into the slurred, soft “r”-less drawl of his own South, “an oath is an oath, and a promise is little sho’t of it. I fought foh yoh country because I thought yoh country was right. But I come at last to fight foh her, because I’ve got to be proud of her and of belonging to her. And I want to pay the best bit of respect I can think of to those men I fought along with. It just pleases me some to think poor old Pug and Billy and a right smart mo’ we knew would like it—I’m going to take out naturalization papers just as soon as I can do it.”
“Like it,” said Larry, with his eyes glistening; “why, yes, I think they’d like it.”
Kentucky hesitated a little, then went on slowly: “And theh’s some verses I know that have so’t of come to map out a route fo’ me to follow. Oveh theh those verses stood right up an’ spoke to me. I’ve thought it oveh quite a lot since, an’ it’s sure plain to me that I was made to see how close they fitted to what I could see, an’ heah, an’ undehstand, just so I could use the otheh verses to show me otheh things I could not undehstand. I’d like to tell yo’ some of those verses an’ how they come in.”
He told first the picture he had seen of the German prisoners searching amongst their own heaped dead, while the British guard stood watching them, and the sky flickered with “the fateful lightning” and the guns growled their triumph song; and then went on and repeated the verse of the Battle Hymn, “Mine eyes have seen——”