“We were a living stench.”
“Good God!” said Brand.
Eileen O’Connor waved back the remembrance. “Tell me of England and of Ireland. How’s the little Green Isle? Has it done well in the war?”
“The Irish troops fought like heroes,” said Brand.
“But there were not enough of them. Recruiting was slow, and there was—some trouble.”
He did not speak about the Irish Rebellion.
“I heard about it vaguely, from prisoners,” said the girl. “It was England’s fault, I expect. Dear old blundering, muddle-headed England, who is a tyrant through fear, and twists Irish loyalty into treason by ropes of red tape in which the Irish mind gets strangled and awry. Well, there’s another subject to avoid. I want to hear only good things to-night. Tell me of London, of Kensington Gardens, of the way from Strand to Temple Bar, of the lights that gleam along the Embankment when lovers go hand-in-hand and see stars in the old black river. Are they all there?”
“They are all changed,” said Brand. “It is a place of gloom. There are no lights along the embankment. They have dowsed their glims for fear of air-raids. There are few lovers hand-in-hand. Some of the boys lie dead round Ypres, or somewhere on the Somme, or weep out of blind eyes, or gibber in shell-shock homes, or try to hop on one leg—while waiting for artificial limbs—or trudge on, to-night, towards Maubeuge, where German machine-guns wait for them behind the ditches. Along the Strand goes the painted flapper, luring men to hell. In Kensington Gardens there are training camps for more boys ear-marked for the shambles, and here and there among the trees young mothers who are widows before they knew their wifehood. There is vice, the gaiety of madness, the unspeakable callousness of people who get rich on war, or earn fat wages, and in small stricken homes a world of secret grief. That is London in time of war. I hate it.”
Brand spoke with bitterness and a melancholy that startled the girl who sat with folded hands below the crucifix on the whitewashed wall behind her.
“Dear God! Is it like that?”