Patsey thoroughly enjoyed the training, and within seven months of enlisting embarked for France; and after a few weeks’ pleasant life in billets, gradually moved north until finally the battalion took over trenches in the famous salient of Ypres—a great contrast to Patsey’s home in the west of Ireland.
There happened to be in the battalion a young Irish subaltern by name Anthony Blake, and when Blake told his Company Sergeant-Major to find him a servant—an Irishman if possible—Patsey at once volunteered for the job, and between the two young Irishmen there soon sprang up a friendship through the common bond of danger and discomfort.
After some time Patsey learnt through one of the boys with whom he had first crossed to England that his mother was dangerously ill, and that she had repeatedly written to Patsey to come home and see her before she died, but had naturally received no answer. In his trouble he appealed to Blake, and that night found him waiting at Popperinghe Station for the leave train with a return-warrant to Ballybor in his pocket.
On his arrival at Ballybor he set out on his long fifteen-mile tramp to his home at Cloonalla, and late on a summer’s evening the family of Mulligan were startled by a British soldier in full marching order walking into their home.
Before his mother died she made Patsey promise that he would not go back to France, and that he would stay at home and help his father to mind the other children. It is hard for a son to refuse his dying mother, and doubly so for an Irish boy.
When his mother’s funeral was over, Patsey buried his uniform and equipment in a bog-hole at night; but his rifle he hid in the thatch of an outhouse, and it was given out in the neighbourhood that he had been discharged from the Army as medically unfit.
After the usual time Patsey was posted as a deserter in his battalion; Blake found a new servant and forgot all about his late one, while Patsey settled down to work with his father, and the memory of Blake and the British Army faded from his mind.
Though wounded three times, Blake was one of the lucky men to return home to Ireland at the end of the war, and at once set about looking for a job. The son of a country doctor in the south of Ireland, at the outbreak of war he had just left school, and had not had time to settle on a career.
But if in England it was hard for ex-officers to get employment, in Ireland it was doubly so; and Blake soon found that it was next to impossible for a man who had worn the King’s uniform to get any work or appointment. The power of Sinn Fein was beginning to be felt in the land, and though many people would have gladly employed men returned from the front, they dared not.
At last, when he had quite given up hope, he received by post an offer to join the newly-formed Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary, and, gladly jumping at such an offer, was soon in training at the depot in Dublin. After a tour of duty in the south, the authorities offered him a cadetship in the R.I.C., and in the course of two months Blake found himself the District Inspector at Ballybor.