“On being alive? Is that a blessing?”
I had been brooding over the fact that I was lame for life. Gorman’s breezy cheerfulness rather jarred me.
“Of course it’s a blessing to be alive,” said Gorman, “but I wasn’t thinking of that. What I was congratulating you on was being a hero. D.S.O., isn’t it? Tell me all about it, won’t you?”
I have been given the right of appending those three letters to my name, so I suppose I must have avoided the worst kinds of blundering and incompetence. But I have no recollection of doing anything to deserve the honour. I fear I answered Gorman rather ill-temperedly.
“There’s nothing whatever to tell,” I said. “I just crawled about in a trench, generally muddy. Everybody else did exactly the same.”
Gorman is still the same man he always was, amazingly tactful and sympathetic. He realised at once that I hated talking about the war and was in no mood for recounting my own experiences. Instead of pressing me with silly questions until he drove me mad, he dropped the subject of my D.S.O. and began to babble agreeably about other things.
“Politics,” he said, “have got into a frightful state. In fact there are hardly any politics at all. We haven’t had a decent rag since the war began. We all sit round cooing at each other like beastly little green lovebirds in a cage. It can’t last long, of course. Sooner or later somebody’s bound to break out and try to bite; but for the present Parliament’s the dullest place in Europe.”
I began to feel slightly interested.
“I remember hearing,” I said, “that you Nationalists promised not to cheer for the Germans.”
“We did more than that,” said Gorman. “We rallied to the Empire at the very start and have kept on rallying ever since. It felt odd at first, but you get used to anything in time, even to being loyal. You’d have been surprised if you’d heard me singing, ‘God Save the King’ in Dublin last week.”