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.
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