“Quick!” said one of the officers.
There was a wild scramble over the parapet, a drop into the wet ditch, and a race for home over No Man’s Land, which was white under the German flares and noisy with the waspish note of bullets.
The other party were longer away and had greater trouble to find a way through, but they, too, got home, with one officer badly wounded, and wonderful luck to escape so lightly. The enemy suffered from “the jumps” for several nights afterward, and threw bombs into their own barbed wire, as though the English were out there again. And at the sound of those bombs the West Yorks laughed all along their trenches.
IX
It was always astonishing, though afterward familiar in those battlefields of Flanders, to find oneself in the midst of so many nationalities and races and breeds of men belonging to that British family of ours which sent its sons to sacrifice. In those trenches there were all the ways of speech, all the sentiment of place and history, all the creeds and local customs and songs of old tradition which belong to the mixture of our blood wherever it is found about the world.
The skirl of the Scottish bagpipes was heard through all the years of war over the Flemish marshlands, and there were Highlanders and Lowlanders with every dialect over the border. In one line of trenches the German soldiers listened to part-songs sung in such trained harmony that it was as if a battalion of opera-singers had come into the firing-line. The Welshmen spoke their own language. For a time no officer received his command unless he spoke it as fluently as running water by Aberystwyth, and even orders were given in this tongue until a few Saxons, discovered in the ranks, failed to form fours and know their left hand from their right in Welsh.
The French-Canadians did not need to learn the language of the peasants in these market towns. Soldiers from Somerset used many old Saxon words which puzzled their cockney friends, and the Lancashire men brought the northern bur with them and the grit of the northern spirit. And Ireland, though she would not have conscription, sent some of the bravest of her boys out there, and in all the bloodiest battles since that day at Mons the old fighting qualities of the Irish race shone brightly again, and the blood of her race has been poured out upon these tragic fields.
One of the villages behind the lines of Arras was so crowded with Irish boys at the beginning of ’16 that I found it hard not to believe that a part of old Ireland itself had found its way to Flanders. In one old outhouse the cattle had not been evicted. Twelve Flemish cows lay cuddled up together on the ground floor in damp straw, which gave out a sweet, sickly stench, while the Irish soldiers lived upstairs in the loft, to which they climbed up a tall ladder with broken rungs.
I went up the ladder after them—it was very shaky in the middle—and, putting my head through the loft, gave a greeting to a number of dark figures lying in the same kind of straw that I had smelled downstairs. One boy was sitting with his back to the beams, playing a penny whistle very softly to himself, or perhaps to the rats under the straws.
“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 skyline, 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
