“The craytures are that bold,” said a boy from County Cork, “that when we first came in they sat up smilin' and sang 'God Save Ireland.' Bedad, and it's the truth I'm after tellin' ye.”
The billets were wet and dirty. But it was good to be away from the shells, even if the rain came through the beams of a broken roof and soaked through the plaster of wattle walls. The Irish boys were good at making wood fires in these old barns and pigsties, if there were a few bricks about to make a hearth, and, sure, a baked potato was no Protestant with a grudge against the Pope.
There were no such luxuries in the trenches when the Dublins and the Munsters were up in the firing-line at the Hohenzollern. The shelling was so violent that it was difficult to get up the supplies, and some of the boys had to fall back on their iron rations. It was the only complaint which one of them made when I asked him what he thought of his first experience under fire.
“It was all right, sorr, and not so bad as I'd been after thinking, if only my appetite had not been bigger than my belt, at all.”
The spirit of these Irishmen was shown by some who had just come out from the old country to join their comrades in the firing-line. When the Germans put over a number of shells, smashing the trenches and wounding men, the temper of the lads broke out, and they wanted to get over the parapet and make a dash for the enemy. “'Twould taych him a lesson,” they told their officers, who had some trouble in restraining them.
These newcomers had to take part in the digging which goes on behind the lines at night—out in the open, without the shelter of a trench. It was nervous work, especially when the German flares went up, silhouetting their figures on the sky-line, and when one of the enemy's machine-guns began to chatter. But the Irish boys found the heart for a jest, and one of them, resting on his spade a moment, stared over to the enemy's lines and said, “May the old devil take the spalpeen who works that typewriter!”
It was a scaring, nerve-racking time for those who had come fresh to the trenches, some of those boys who had not guessed the realities of war until then. But they came out proudly—“with their tails up,” said one of their officers—after their baptism of fire.
The drum-and-fife band of the Munsters was practising in an old barn on the wayside, and presently, in honor of visitors—who were myself and another—the pipers were sent for. They were five tall lads, who came striding down the street of Flemish cottages, with the windbags under their arms, and then, with the fife men sitting on the straw around them and the drummers standing with their sticks ready, they took their breath for “the good old Irish tune” demanded by the captain.
It was a tune which men could not sing very safely in Irish yesterdays, and it held the passion of many rebellious hearts and the yearning of them.
Oh, Paddy dear, and did you hear the news that's going round? The shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground.