Yet I rode back not altogether happily. I had come through with my life, I was maimed but by no means crippled for future usefulness, my nerves and mind were unimpaired, I had the King’s decoration on my coat, but for all that I felt an actual keen pang of lonesomeness. I was out of it—out of the big fight.
CHAPTER XXI
The Gray Mother
I will close this book with words far nobler and more graceful than any I could pen which speak for the spirit which has brought to England, from East and South and North and West the hundreds of thousands, the millions who have taken up arms for her in this great trial of her future life, her prestige and her honor and for the humanity, democracy and civilization which history grants she has always championed.
I got it from an Anzac private crippled for life, as he lay on a hospital cot in London, and he told me he had it from his father, a veteran of the Boer War, who had treasured it from that time. It was a clipping from the London Spectator, deeply yellowed in the passing of nearly a score of years. And it reads:
THE GRAY MOTHER
(To an Old Gaelic Air)
From the Spectator
Lo, how they come to me,
Long through the night I call them,
Ah, how they turn to me.