She's the most distressful country that ever yet was seen; They're hanging men and women there for wearing of the green.
Then the pipers played the “March of O'Neill,” a wild old air as shrill and fierce as the spirit of the men who came with their Irish battle-cries against Elizabeth's pikemen and Cromwell's Ironsides.
I thought then that the lads who still stayed back in Ireland, and the old people there, would have been glad to stand with me outside that Flemish barn and to hear the old tunes of their race played by the boys who were out there fighting.
I think they would have wept a little, as I saw tears in the eyes of an Irish soldier by my side, for it was the spirit of Ireland herself, with all her poetry, and her valor, and her faith in liberty, which came crying from those pipes, and I wished that the sound of them could carry across the sea.
That was a year before I saw the Irish battalions come out of Guichy, a poor remnant of the strength that had gone in, all tattered and torn, and caked with the filth of battle, and hardly able to stagger along. But they pulled themselves up a little, and turned eyes left when they passed their brigadier, who called out words of praise to them.
It was more than a year later than that when I saw the last of them, after a battle in Flanders, when they were massacred, and lay in heaps round German redoubts, up there in the swamps.
X
Early in the morning of February 23d there was a clear sky with a glint of sun in it, and airplanes were aloft as though it would be a good flying-day. But before midday the sky darkened and snow began to fall, and then it snowed steadily for hours, so that all the fields of Flanders were white.
There was a strange, new beauty in the war zone which had changed all the pictures of war by a white enchantment. The villages where our soldiers were billeted looked as though they were expecting a visit from Santa Claus. The snow lay thick on the thatch and in soft, downy ridges on the red-tiled roofs. It covered, with its purity, the rubbish heaps in Flemish farmyards and the old oak beams of barns and sheds where British soldiers made their beds of straw. Away over the lonely country which led to the trenches, every furrow in the fields was a thin white ridge, and the trees, which were just showing a shimmer of green, stood ink-black against the drifting snow-clouds, with a long white streak down each tall trunk on the side nearest to the wind. The old windmills of Flanders which looked down upon the battlefields had been touched by the softly falling flakes, so that each rib of their sails and each rung of their ladders and each plank of their ancient timbers was outlined like a frosty cobweb.