“Big er little, it don’t matter,” replied Tim. “It ain’t the soize of a mon thot counts; it’s the spirit of him,” which Don was glad to admit. And he sized up the little Irishman as one having a large spirit when it came to a scrap.
And there was the movement of men, of guns big and little, of airplanes; there were aerial battles, bombings, raids and counter-attacks, which were seen but little by the ambulance drivers, but the immediate results were realistic enough. Tim Casey found a remark or two that fitted every occasion and he declared one fight even bloodier than an Irish holiday.
“Ah, me b’y, if the bloody gobs in this here scrap had only had clubs—shillalahs—phw’at wud they done to each ither? If Oi was the ginral of this outfit, b’gorry, Oi’d sthart out a raidin’ party of all Irish from County Kerry, give ’em shillalahs an’ the war’d be over the next day! The kaiser wud call it inhuman, of coorse, an’ right he’d be, but we’d win jist the same.”
“Now, what could clubs do against guns?” Don laughed. “They’d have you all shot dead before you got near enough to soak them.”
“An wud they? Thin, me b’y, how come they to use bayonets? Tell me thot.”
“Its a thing I can’t understand and I guess I never will; unless it’s after the ammunition on both sides gives out that they use them. Maybe if they’d do away with ammunition in wars shillalahs would be handier than guns and worse than bayonets.”
“Oi’ll write the C. and C. about thot same,” said Tim.
But whatever frightful atrocities and science had done to make this war a horror beyond the conception of those who could not witness it, the most terrible of all was the Hun bombing of hospitals. There was, as with many other things indulged in by the Germans, nothing gained by these acts—nothing but deeper exasperation and determination on the part of those who were forced to fight the Hun. He saw others through his own shade of yellow and imagined that he could frighten his foes and lessen their morale that way—but it produced exactly the opposite effect.
The cross-roads evacuation hospital tents back of the Montdidier front suffered from German airmen, not many days after the great German push for Amiens had been stopped. Plainly an act of hatred, this bombing gained nothing for the Huns. They had lost thousands of men in killed, wounded and prisoners and wanted the Allies to suffer still more.