He will see the dead cities and the great desert wastes and the swamps--it is in those swamps under the merciless sun that our terror lies; he will deal with a fierce and treacherous people whose thoughts are not as our thoughts, whose motives and beliefs are irreconcilably alien; and this dangerous race is fermenting under the influences, the money, the lies, the ceaseless open and secret poison leaven of a race more treacherous, more dangerous still.
Blinding sunshine, black shadows, arid stretches of dried earth and mud and burnt vegetation; the colour of the Eastern crowd, the river waters and the harbour stretch; the Arab and the Kurd, the Turk, the Armenian, and the Jew, sights and scenes and creatures that have been but as names to us, are about him. He has followed the drum from Cape Town to Magaliesburg, from Bloemfontein to Bethlehem, from Gibraltar to Cork, from Soupir to Ypres, from Ypres to Plymouth, and from Plymouth to the Euphrates; he has left his cool, green Ireland, his hunting and his fishing, his own wide acres and the rural life among his beasts for this picturesque, unknown, uncertain destiny!
Often in the long hot hours will not his mind go back to those stretches of shady, luxuriant park land where his cattle feed; to the great lime avenue with the voice of the bees; the circle of the purple hills, the woods, those incomparable woods of our old home with their cool depths of bracken, silver green; the dells, the climbing roads, the view over the “deer-park” to the sunset, which impressed even our childish imaginations; the voice of the wild pigeons through the trees; and the immense white house--empty--which before this war broke out, he was about to furnish; the corridors, the vast rooms full of memories; latterly, to us, of hopes. His heart will be there, we know.
And his home is guarded by his faithful Spanish servant, who followed him, out of love, from those far Gibraltar days of his young soldier’s life; who, when a legacy made of him a comparatively rich man, refused to profit of it, and sent the money back to a distant relative in Spain, saying: “What do I want of it? You, my master, you, my father, you, my mother, you, my country, you, all I want!” Pedro, by a singular freak of fate, ruling this Irish land with an equal zeal and ability, writes to us: “I pray my dere master may come home safe. I have great hope in Our Lady, the Mother of God.”