Patrick MacLean, the color-sergeant, grinned as he reached out a welcoming hand to both surgeon and nurse. He was a prime favorite with them, as with his own lads. When pain wrestled for the upper hand, when things went wrong, moods turned black, or nights stretched interminably long and unendurable, Patsy could always turn the trick and produce something so absorbingly interesting or ridiculous that the pain and the long nights were forgotten. How well Sheila remembered that first time they had dressed his wounds! The muscles had stood out on his arms like whipcords; sweat poured down his face. He fainted twice, each time coming round to drawl out his story in that unforgetable Irish way:
“We were dthrivin’ them afore us like sheep, all so tame an’ sociable I was forgettin’ where I was. Somehow the notion took me I was back on the moorlan’ drivin’ the flocks for my father, when a Fritzie overhead drops a bomb on our captain.... It spatters the mud in my eyes somethin’ terrible, an’ when I rubs them clean again the machine-guns were cacklin’ all round us like a parcel o’ hens layin’ eggs; we’d stumbled on a nest of them. Holy Pether, I was mad! I was for stickin’ the colors in the muzzle o’ one o’ their bloody guns, an’ I sings out as I rush ’em, ‘Erin go bragh!’ Then down I goes. Culmullen, there, comes staggerin’ up. ‘Take the colors,’ says I. ‘I’ve got no legs to carry ’em on.’ ‘I can’t,’ says he; ‘I’ve got no arms to shoulder ’em.’... A bit aftherwards I sees Jamie—he’s second in command—come runnin’ up wild, but his arms an’ legs is still in pairs, so I shouts afore things go black, ‘The colors, Jamie, ye take the colors.’ ‘Wish to God, Patsy, I could,’ says he, ‘but I can’t see.’... Faith, weren’t we a healthy lot, miss? An’ we the Royal Irish!” He had grinned then as he was grinning now.
Culmullen in the next cot, a schoolmaster from Ballygowan, raised his head. “Miss O’Leary, Patsy’s the worst liar in Ulster. Ye might keep that in mind whenever he has anything to tell. If I had had the schooling of ye, I’d have thrashed the thruth into ye, ye rascal! Will ye kindly lean over and brush the hair out of my eyes, and if ye tickle my nose this time, I’ll have Larry thrash ye for me the instant he’s up.”
The color-sergeant pulled himself over and gently brushed back the straggling hair. “Such a purty lad!” he murmured, sarcastically. “What’s an arm or two so long’s the Fritzies didn’t ruin one o’ them handsome features—nor shorten the length o’ your tongue.”
“What is it this time, Sergeant?” Sheila spoke coaxingly as she bent to the dressings.
“Well, ye know I’ve said from the beginnin’ ’twas no ways natural havin’ them legs o’ mine twistin’ an’ achin’ same as if they were still hangin’ onto me. I leave it to both of yez. If they’d been anyways decent legs an’ considerate o’ the kindness I’ve always shown them, wouldn’t they have quit pestherin’ me when they took Dutch leave?”
“Stop moralizin’,” shouted Johnnie O’Neil, the piper from Antrim. “Get down to the p’int o’ your tale.”
“It hasn’t any point: it’s flat,” growled the lance-corporal.
Unembarrassed, Patsy MacLean went on: “I was a-thinkin’ this all over again last night, a-listenin’ to the ambulances comin’ in, when a breath o’ wind pushes the door open a bit, an’ in walks, as natural as life, the ghost o’ them two legs. ’Tis the gospel truth I’m tellin’ ye. They walked a bit bowlegged, same as they always did, straight through the door an’ down the ward. An’ the queer thing is they never stopped by Larry’s cot or Casey Ryan’s—the heathen!—but came right on to me.”
“Faith, they wouldn’t have had the nerve to stop. The leg Casey lost was as straight as a hazel wand, same as mine.” Larry snorted contemptuously.