“Will you mind going back?” said a rather foolish friend of ours to an exhausted, badly wounded sufferer in a Dublin hospital. He had seen Mons and its horrors, all the brutality of war with little of its concomitant glory. The eyes in his drawn face looked up at her steadily.
“If it’s my dooty, lady, I’m ready to go.”
“I’d give my other leg to go back,” said a maimed lad to Lady ----. He was in a hospital at Lyndhurst, a fair, splendid boy, not yet eighteen.
“Don’t make me too soft, Sister,” pleaded an Irish Fusilier with five bullet wounds in his back, to his kindly nurse in the little convent hospital near here. “I’ve got to finish my job out there.”
At a recent lecture delivered on “Five Months with the British Expeditionary Force”--his own experience--Professor Morgan made use of these remarkable words: “Our men count no cost too high in the service of the nation. They greet death like a friend, and go into battle as to a festival.”
What wonder, then, that there should be such an unshakable spirit of confidence throughout the whole of our army, for with conscience at peace, and eyes fixed on their high ideal, they go forth to fight, knowing that, as a great preacher has said, those who do battle in a just cause already carry the flame of victory on their foreheads.
“Come, my tan-faced children, Follow well in order, get your weapons ready! Have you your pistols?--Have you your sharp-edged axes?
For we cannot tarry here--we must march, my darlings; we must bear the brunt of danger!
O resistless, restless race! O beloved race in all! O, my breast Aches with tender love for all! O, I mourn and yet exult. I am rapt with love for all!”
The master of the Villino got the telegram when he was shaving, that morning of October 26.
He came straight in to the Signora, who instantly read all kinds of sinister meanings into the reticent lines.
Slightly wounded! H. would be sure to say that whatever had happened. Even if he had lost an arm or a leg he might very well try and break it to us in some such phrase. There were certainly grounds for consolation in the fact that he should be “going London,” but were not the papers full of accounts of the felicitous manner in which the transport of very serious cases was being daily accomplished?