On a delightful spring day after the Battle of Arras, our battalion was holding the front line out beyond Thelus. My aid post was on a sunken road near Willerval, one of the many sunken roads which are talked about by anyone who has ever been at the front. The wounded had to be brought to us by stretcher bearers at night, as the whole front here was a huge salient with the Huns pumping lead forget-me-nots from three sides by day on the least exposure of our men.
So our work was all night work, and I lay lazily on a stretcher in an abandoned German gunpit, taking a sun bath. There originally had been a roof over this gunpit. It was made up of one-inch boards laid carelessly across steel supports, and in the remains of this roof two little swallows were gaily chirping, love-making, and nest-building for their family-to-be, ignoring entirely man's inhumanity to man. Kelly was sitting on his haunches, his gray head held on one side, thoughtfully watching these happy little birds.
"Well, Kelly," I demanded, "of what are you dreaming?"
"I was jest thinkin', docthor," he answered, without turning his head, "what a puny sinse of humor man has in comparison with thim swallows yonder."
"Have swallows a sense of humor, Kelly?"
"Have they a sinse of humor? Whoy, they're laughin' at ye this very minute"; I turned my head a trifle sharply in his direction; "an' at me, an' the rist of humanity. Listen to thim laugh. An' whoy shouldn't they laugh, whin they think what a gay world they live in, with room fer all of thim an' all of us; an' yet whoile they live, an' love, an' have their young, an' doie in peace, we min, wid the brains of gods, so we say, spind our toime invintin' new manes of killin' aich other? An' fer whoy? For a few acres of bog land, fer the privilege of christianizin' an' chatin' the haithin by givin' him some glass beads in exchange fer his iv'ry, an' his indy rubber, an' his spoices. Take a look yander at that skoylark. Wouldn't he do yer heart good?"
And he pointed to where one of those joy-giving birds was soaring "higher still and higher," and lavishly pouring out upon an ungrateful world his flood of harmony divine.
"What about liberty as opposed to this cursed German militarism?"
"Oh, yis, Oi'll admit there's a bit o' truth in that, but at bottom it's mostly commerce that causes war. Yis, Oi shouldn't loike to have the Prushin military heel on moy neck. God knows the Englishman in his toime has left a heel mark or two on the Oirishman's neck, but at that Oi'd rather have him, especially of late years, than that cursed Hun, fer he wears nails in his boots. An' Oi've hated the Englishman all me loife——"
"What the devil did you come out here for anyway, Kelly?"