Reconciliation between wounded foemen is happily a common occurrence on the stricken plain. The malignant roar of the guns may still be in their ears, and they may see around them bodies battered and twisted out of all human shape. All the more are they anxious to testify that there is no fury in their hearts with each other, and that their one wish is to make the supreme parting with words of reconciliation and prayers on their lips. I have had from a French officer, who was wounded in a cavalry charge early in the war, an account of a pathetic incident which took place close to where he lay. Among his companions in affliction were two who were far gone on the way to death. One was a private in the Uhlans, and the other a private in the Royal Irish Dragoons. The Irishman got, with a painful effort, from an inside pocket of his tunic a rosary beads which had a crucifix attached to it. Then he commenced to mutter to himself the invocations to the Blessed Virgin of which the Rosary is composed. "Hail, Mary! full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus." The German, lying huddled close by, stirred with the uneasy movements of a man weak from pain and loss of blood on hearing the murmur of prayer, and, looking round in a dazed condition, the sight of the beads in the hands of his fellow in distress seemed to recall to his mind other times and different circumstances—family prayers at home somewhere in Bavaria, and Sunday evening devotions in church, for he made, in his own tongue, the response to the invocation: "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now at the hour of our death. Amen." So the voices intermingled in address and prayer—the rapt ejaculations of the Irishman, the deep guttural of the German—getting weaker and weaker, in the process of dissolution, until they were hushed on earth for evermore.
War has outwardly lost its romance, with its colour and pageantry. It is bloody, ugly and horrible. Yet romance is not dead. It still survives, radiant and glowing, in the heroic achievements of our soldiers, and in the tender impulses of their hearts.
THE END
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THE IRISH AT THE FRONT
By MICHAEL MacDONAGH
FROM THE REVIEWS OF THE FIRST SERIES
Westminster Gazette.—"Mr. MacDonagh has crammed into a small volume an almost incredible number of thrilling stories of great deeds, whether of collective dash and daring and endurance or of individual heroism. He has found his material in the letters of officers and men and the conversation of those who have come home, as well as from the records compiled at regimental depots; and he has utilised it skilfully, avoiding too frequent quotation and giving his reader a connected and fluent narrative that is of absorbing interest. He gives us vivid pictures of the retreat from Mons—of the Irish Guards receiving their baptism of fire; of the Connaught Rangers' part in the first stand that was made ('It was a grand time we had,' one of them said, 'and I wouldn't have missed it for lashin's of money!'); of the Dublins at Cambrai, where they went into the fray in a way that is well described as 'uproariously and outrageously Irish,' after singing all the Fenian songs for which they had time; and of the Munsters who harnessed themselves cheerfully, for lack of horses, to the guns they had captured from the Germans. He tells us of the green flag that Corporal Cunningham bought from a pedlar in London, and that the Irish Guards have since followed to the gates of death on a score of fields; of the Irish Rifles rallying to the 'view-hallo' that Lieutenant Graham gave them on a French newsboy's horn; of the glorious sacrifices of the Dublins and the Munsters at the Gallipoli landings; and of the desperate resistance at Loos, where, as the Brigadier said to his men when it was over, 'It was the London Irish who helped to save a whole British Army Corps.' From first to last it is a glorious story of almost incredible deeds."