We asked them to tea; the Sister said that “the Matron said they couldn’t do that”; but they could come for morning lunch about half-past ten o’clock, and have bread-and-butter and see the garden. And they would like to come very much indeed, preferably next day. The Matron further opined about twelve would feel well enough to avail themselves of our hospitality.

It gave us very little time for preparation, and the baker declined to provide us with buns so early. But it was very hot, fortunately; so Mrs. McComfort set to work at dawn to prepare lemonade and fruit salad, and immense slices of bread-and-jam. And we were very glad she had been so lavish in her Irish generosity when we heard the sound of voices and the tramping of feet in the courtyard: it seemed as if there were a regiment of them! In reality there were only twenty—twenty smiling, stalwart “blue-coat boys.” Some with an arm in a sling; two or three limping along with the help of a stick; one with a bandaged head; three, in spite of a brave front, with that look of strain and tragedy in the eyes which stamps even those who have been only slightly “gassed.”

They are very much amused at the little outing, as pleased and as easily diverted as children, not anxious to talk about their experiences, but answering with perfect ease and simplicity any question that is made to them on the subject. They are chiefly excited over our little dogs. We wish that we had twenty instead of only three; or that we had borrowed from a neighbour’s household for the occasion. Every man wants to nurse a dog, and those who have secured the privilege are regarded with considerable envy by the others.

The younger members of the famiglia are in a desperate state of excitement, and there is a great flutter of aprons, and cheeks flame scarlet under caps pinned slightly crooked in the agitation of the moment.

Miss Flynn the housemaid, Miss O’Toole the parlourmaid, are stirred to rapture to discover an Irish corporal, wounded at Ypres. We think they talk more of Tipperary—it really is Tipperary—than of Flanders. Miss Flynn, a handsome, black-eyed, black-haired damsel, with a colour that beats the damask roses on the walls of the Villino, has been born and bred in England. She is more forthcoming than Miss O’Toole, who has the true Hibernian reserve; who looks deprecatingly from under her fair aureole of hair, and expects and gives the utmost respectfulness in all her relations with the opposite sex.

They say this lovely sensitive modesty of the Irish girl is dying out. The penny novelette, the spread of emancipation and education—save the mark!—facilities of communication, have done away with it. More’s the pity if this be true, for it was a bloom on the womanhood of Ireland no polish can replace; it added something incommunicably lovable to the grace of the girls, something holy, almost august, to the tenderness of the mothers.

When the Signora was a child in Ireland the peasant wife still spoke of her husband as “the master”; and in the wilds of Galway, quite recently, she has seen the women in the roads pull their shawls over their faces at the approach of a stranger. The humble matron of the older type will still walk two paces behind her husband. These are, of course, but indications of the austere conception of life which an unquestioning acceptance of her faith kept alive in the breast of the Irishwoman. When she promised to love and honour him, the husband became de facto “the master.” Yet the influence of the Irish wife and mother in her own home in no way suffered from this conception of her duty. She was as much “herself” upon the lips of her lord as he “himself” upon hers. It used to be a boast that the purity of the Irish maiden and the Irish mother was a thing apart, inassailable. The Signora’s recollections of Ireland, of a childhood passed in a country house that kept itself very much in touch with its poor neighbours and dependants, bring her back many instances of drunkenness among the men, alas! and the consequent fights and factions; of slovenliness among the women, and hopeless want of thrift and energy; in one or two instances, indeed, of flagrant dishonesty; but she never remembers a single occasion marked by the shocked whisper, the swift and huddled dismissal, or any of the other tokens by which a fall from feminine virtue is mysteriously conveyed to the child mind.

Among all the poor cottage homes, the various farms, great and small, prosperous or neglected, each with their strapping brood of splendid youth, never one can she recollect about whose name there was a silence; never a single one of these dewy-eyed, fresh-faced girls that did not carry the innocence of their baptism in the half-deprecating, half-confident looks they cast upon “the quality.”

Naturally there must have been exceptions; and naturally, too, this state of affairs could not have applied to some of the more miserable quarters of the towns. Nevertheless, the Ireland of a quarter of a century ago had not forgotten she had once been called the Island of Saints; and her mothers and daughters kept very preciously the vestal flame alive in their pure breasts.

Times have changed, and more’s the pity, as we have said. But now and again a flower blooms as if upon the old roots, and though Mary O’Toole is transplanted to England, we trust that she may keep her infantile innocence and her exquisite—there is no English equivalent—pudeur.

It was a picture to see her in her cornflower-blue cotton frock, with her irrepressible hair tucked as tidily as nature would allow beneath her white cap, staggering under the weight of a tray charged with refreshments for the wounded. She is about five-foot nothing, with a throat the average male hand could encircle with a finger and thumb, but among the twenty soldiers, all of different ages, classes, and, of course, dispositions, who visited us that day, there was not one but regarded her with as much respect as if she had been six foot high and as ill-favoured as Sally Brass—we hope, however, with considerably more pleasure.

When the blue-coat boys have been duly refreshed, they wander out into the garden. They remind one irresistibly of a school, and there is something tenderly droll in their complete submission to the little plump sister, who orders them about with a soft voice and certain authority.

“No. 20, come out of the sun. No. 15, I’d rather you didn’t sit on the grass.”

Then she turns apologetically to us: “It isn’t that I don’t know it’s quite dry.” (We should think it was, on our sandy heights, after five weeks’ drought!) “But I never know quite where I am with the gassed cases. That’s the worst of them. They’re perfectly well one day, and we say, ‘Thank goodness, that’s all over,’ and the next day its up in his eyes, perhaps!”

“I’ll never be the same man again,” suddenly exclaims a short, saturnine young Canadian, who has not—a marked exception to the others—once smiled since he came, and who keeps a dark grudge in his eyes. He seems perfectly well, except for that curious expression, to our uninitiated gaze, but his voice is weak and there is a languor about his movements extraordinarily out of keeping with his build, which is all for strength, like that of a young Hercules.

“I’ll never be the same man again; I feel that. It’s shortened my life by a many years. So it has with them over there.” He jerks his thumb towards his comrades in misfortune. “They’ll none of them ever be the same men again.”

The Signora tries feebly to protest, but the nurse acquiesces placidly. It is the hospital way, and not a bad way either; misfortunes are not minimized, they are faced.

The Signora has an unconquerable timidity where other people’s reticences are concerned, and was far from emulating the amiable audacity of a close relative—at present on a visit to the Villino—whose voice she hears raised in the distance with query after query: “Where was it? In your leg? Does it hurt? Do you mind? Do you want to go back again?” But when she sees that the men indubitably like this frank attack, and respond, smiling and stimulated, the silence of her Canadian begins to weigh upon her. She tries him with a bashful question:

“Is your home in a town in Canada?”

“No, not in a town. Three hundred and eighty miles away from the nearest of any importance.”

“Oh, dear! Then it must take you a long time to hear from your people.”

The young harsh face darkens.

The post only comes to his home out yonder once a week, anyhow, but he hasn’t heard but once since he left. Not at all since he came to England wounded.

“Oh, dear!” exclaimed the Signora again, scenting a grievance. “But if it’s so far away, you couldn’t have heard yet.”

The lowering copper-hued countenance—it is curiously un-English, and reminds one vaguely of those frowning black marble busts in the Capitol: young Emperors already savagely conscious of their own unlimited power—takes a deeper gloom.

He could have heard. No. 9 had had a letter that morning, and his home was forty miles further north.

“Had No. 9 a letter?” asks the little Sister.

She sits plump and placid in her cloak, and looks like a dove puffing out her feathers in the sunshine. We have said she has a cooing voice.

“Yes, he had,” says the Canadian, and digs a vindictive finger into the dry grass.

The Signora, fearing the conversation is going to lapse, plunges into the breach.

“What was your work at home? Farming, I suppose.”

This remark meets with an unexpected success. The poor, fierce eyes—that seem never to have ceased from contemplation of unpardonable injury since that day at Ypres when the fumes of hell belched up before them—brighten.

“Wa-al! I do sometimes this and sometimes that. I can do most things. It’s just what I happen to want to put my hand to. I’m master of half a dozen trades, I am. I’ve been on the farm, and I’m a blacksmith, and an engineer on the railway; and a barber, and a butcher.”

“Dear me!” says the little Sister.

Her gaze is serenely fixed on the smiling green path. From the shadow in which we sit, it leads to a slope out into the blaze of the sunshine, where a cypress-tree rises like an immense green flame, circled with a shimmer of light. But perhaps her tone conveys rebuke, for our Canadian suddenly relapses into silence, from which we cannot again entice him.

A little further away a friend who is staying with us, and the relative above mentioned, are listening with intense interest to the talk of a tall, black-moustached soldier. His face is very pale under its bronze; he is the worst of the three gas victims who have come to-day. It is only what are called the very slight cases that are treated in the hospital close by.

A much older man this, who has been many years in the army and came over with the Indian division. He has a gentle, thoughtful face. There is no resentment in his eyes—only the look of one who has seen death very close and does not forget—and a great languor, the mark of the gas. He is talking very dispassionately of our reprisals.

“Oh yes, we have used our gas, the freezing-gas! But it don’t seem hardly worth while. It draws their fire so.” Then, with an everyday smile and no more emotion in his tone than if he were descanting on a mousetrap, he goes on to describe the incredibly sudden effect of what he calls the freezing-gas, which we suppose to be the French Turpinite. “It freezes you up, so to speak, right off on the spot. You see a fellow standing, turning his head to talk to a fellow near him. He lifts his hand, maybe, in his talk like; then comes along the gas, and there he stands. You think he’s going on talking. He’s frozen dead, his arm up, looking so natural-like, same as might be me this minute. Oh, it’s quick! what you call instantaneous. But it ain’t ’ardly worth while. The Germans, you see, it draws their fire so. Two or three times we got it in among our own men—oh, by mistake, miss, of course!” This in response to the horrified ejaculation of his interlocutor. “And that didn’t seem ’ardly worth while.”

Beyond this group, again, the daughter of the house, seated on a croquet-box, is surrounded by three sprawling blue soldiers. One of them is talking earnestly to her. The others are so much engaged in a game of “Beggar my Neighbour” with three-year-old Vivi, the Belgian baby, that they do not pay the smallest attention to their companion, and yet what he is saying is horrible enough, startling enough, God knows! The speaker is a fair, pleasant-looking boy with a cocked nose, tightly curling auburn hair, and an air of vitality and energy that makes it difficult to think of him as in anything but the perfection of health. He is a territorial, and evidently belongs to that thinking, well-educated, working class that has made such a magnificent response to the country’s call.

“No, miss, we are not taking many prisoners now. No, we’re not likely to. Well, think of our case. Just one little bit out of the whole long line. They caught our sergeant—the sergeant of my company. We were all very fond of him. Well, miss, they put him up where we could all see him—top of their trench—and tortured him. Yes, miss, all day they tortured him in sight of us, and all day we were trying to get at them and we couldn’t. And when in the evening we did get at them, he was dead, miss. We were all very fond of him. We weren’t likely to give much quarter after that. And our officers”—here he smiles suddenly—“well, miss, we’re Territorials, you see. Our officers just let us loose. We’re Territorials,” he repeated. “They can’t keep us as they keep the regulars. Not in the same military way. No, miss, we didn’t give much quarter!”

Our daughter groans a little. She understands, she sympathizes, yet she regrets. She would like our men to be as absolutely without reproach as they are without fear.

“But you wouldn’t bring yourself down to the level of the Germans,” she says; “you wouldn’t cease doing right because they do wrong?”

He fixes her with bright blue eyes, and they are hard as steel.

“Your British blood will boil,” he says slowly.

It seems impossible to associate such a dark and awful tragedy with this slim English boy and his unconquerable air of joyous youth. The Signorina remembers the repeated phrase, “We were all very fond of him,” and she sickens from the thought of that hellish picture of cruelty and agony on one side, of the impotent grief and rage on the other.

To change the subject, she says:

“How were you wounded?”

And then it transpired he had been carrying in the British wounded at the end of that day. He had been hit in the leg without knowing it, and just as he was starting off to help to carry in the German wounded, he collapsed.

To help to carry in the German wounded! Those Germans who had tortured his own comrade all day! Dear Tommy! Dear, straight, noble, simple British soldier! How could one ever have mistrusted your rough justice or your Christian humanity?

Real boy that he is, he warms up to the glee of narrating his audacities when out at night with a party on listening-post duty.

“Rare fun it was,” he declares.

He used to creep up to the enemy’s trench and bayonet what came handy.

“I couldn’t fire, you see, miss, nor do anything likely to make a noise, so it had to be done on the quiet. But I got a good many that way.”

Baby Vivi is tired of her game of cards. For a while past she has been amusing herself by boxing the two sitting soldiers. Very well-delivered vigorous thumps she applies on their chests with her little fists, and they obligingly go over backwards on the grass. She now comes to exercise her powers on the Territorial. He catches her in his arms.

The men all look at the little girl with strange, troubled, tender eyes. One knows what is at the back of their thought. One of them expresses it presently.

“To think that anyone could ever hurt a little creature like that!”

Vivi’s young mother sits with her small group further away. She has told them how she has fled out of her castle in the Ardennes at dawn, without having had time even to pack her children’s clothes. They had thought themselves safe with the pathetic hopefulness that filled poor Belgium from the moment when the French troops and the English appeared in strength upon the soil. “Now all is well,” they said; “now we are safe.”

A French General and his staff lodged in the chÂteau, and the men camped in the park. On the vigil of the day fixed for their intended advance, the General took her on one side. An old man, he had been through the whole of the war of ’70. He solemnly warned her of the folly of remaining in her home, as she intended.

“Madame, I know the Germans. I know of what they are capable. I have seen them at work; I have not forgotten.”

Should the invader reach a certain point within ten miles of the district she must fly.

All that night the aviators kept coming with messages, and in the early dawn they started. She was up and saw the cavalcade winding away through the park. She stood in the porch to wish them God-speed. The young men were full of ardour. They were going forth to meet the enemy. The General was grave. When he had reached the public road, he sent one of his aide-de-camps riding back at a gallop. Was it a premonition of disaster, or had secret news reached him by some emissary from the field of conflict? The message to her was, that she was to be gone at once with her family. At once!

The young husband had already departed at break of day in their automobile. He and his machine had been offered to the service of the country and accepted. The mother, with her four little children—among them the sturdy, two-year-old Viviane—had to walk to the station, with what luggage could be got together and trundled down in a wheelbarrow. Luckily it was not far—their own station just outside the park-gates. They got the last train that ran from that doomed spot. The German guns were within earshot as they steamed away.

In their hurry they had forgotten to bring any milk or water for the baby girl. The heat was suffocating. The only thing that could be laid hold of was a bottle of white wine which someone had thrust into a bag. Vivi clamoured, and they gave her half a glassful in the end. She enjoyed it very much, and it did not disagree with her at all.

The men in their blue garb listen to some of this story with profound attention. They have a very touching, respectful, earnest way of talking to the Belgian lady, and are very anxious to impress upon her that soon they will have her country cleared of the enemy.

“You tell her that, miss. She do believe it, don’t she? We’re going to sweep them out in no time. Tell her that, miss. That’s what we’re over there for. She’ll soon be able to get back there—back in her own home.”

One of them gazes at her for a while in a kind of brooding silence, and then says huskily:

“Isn’t it a mercy you got away, ma’am—you and your little children!”

He knows. He has seen.

Then Viviane is called upon to sing “Tipperary.”

Though only just three, this child, as has been said before, she looks a sturdy four. The most jovial solid, red-cheeked, blue-eyed, smiling, curly-haired little girl that it is possible to imagine. Her mother says that she never lost her balance and tumbled down even when she first began to toddle; and one can well believe it. There is a mixture of strength and deliberation in everything she does that makes one regret she is not a boy. But she has pretty, coaxing, coquettish ways that are quite feminine.

She now puts her head on one side, and ogles with her blue eyes first one soldier and another, and smiles angelically as she pipes “Tipperary.”

This is a favourite song among the infant population these days. The child of a friend of ours calls it her hymn, and sings it in church.

There is something really engaging in Viviane’s roll of the “r’s.” Her Tipperary is very guttural and conscientious, and her “Good-bye, Piccadeely” always provokes the laughter of admiration.

Encouraged by applause, she bursts into, “We don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go.” And is quite aware, the little rogue, of the effect she will presently produce when, upon an incredibly high note, she announces, “We will keess you.”

After this, she breaks into piety with, “Paradise, oh! Paradise.”

The little plump nurse gets up and shakes out her cloak. It is getting quite late, and they must go back to the hospital. She marshals her charges up on the terrace. They obey her just as if they were very good little boys in charge of their schoolmistress.

“Now say good-bye, and thank you. I’m sure you’ve all enjoyed yourselves. No. 20, where’s your hat? Go down and get your hat, No. 20. No; his poor leg’s tired. You go down and get it, No. 13.”

“I seen it a while ago,” No. 13 announces obligingly.

They say “good-bye” and “thank you” with the conscientiousness of their simple hearts. We shake, one after the other, those outstretched hands that grip back so cordially.

A guest of the Villino—an honoured guest, who is not only one of the most distinguished women artists of the day, but has lived all her married life within sound of the drum; who has been always inspired by the sights and scenes, the high glories and noble disasters of warfare—expresses the feeling struggling in our hearts as she retains the hand of the last of the file of blue-coats in hers: “What an honour to shake the hand of a British soldier!”

We hear them troop away through the little courtyard, laughing and talking. We think, as the small nurse said, that they have had a pleasant time.

One of the small side amusements in life is to hear other people’s reflections upon experiences that one has lived through together, and to measure the distance that lies between different points of view. It makes one realize how extraordinarily difficult it must be to obtain reliable evidence.

A neighbour has obligingly come in to help us with the entertainment. She is the pleasant, middle-aged Irish widow of an Irish doctor, and her good-humour is as pronounced as her brogue. Finding herself alone on the terrace with the Signorina after the departure of the convalescents, she mystified her with the following remark:

“How frightened the poor old lady was!”

The poor old lady? The Signorina was all at sea. There was no one answering to such a description among us to-day.

“The poor old lady,” repeated the other firmly. “Yes, Lady ——. I was talking to her, and oh! anybody could see how terrified she was. Nervous, you know; trembling at the mention of the war, upset, shrinking away. And no wonder, I’m sure,” she concluded genially. “Hasn’t she got a son out there?”

She betook herself down the steps towards her cottage. Our daughter watched the purple-spotted blouse meandering downwards from terrace to terrace till it disappeared. She was too astounded even to be able to remonstrate.

And, indeed, of what use would it have been? That Lady ——, distinguished, humorous, with her figure erect and slender as a girl’s, and her refined, delightful face stamped with genius on the brow, and with the most delicate humour about the mouth; that this incomparable woman, actually in the zenith of her power, personal as well as artistic, a being whom it seems that age can never touch, to whom the years have so far only brought a maturing of all kinds of excellence, should have appeared to anyone as the poor old lady! And that she should be further classed among the frightened! She who more than any fighter of them all sees the romance of war, the high lesson of war; who only the day before, speaking of a discontented soldier friend, had said to us in tones of wonder:

“He’s not enjoying war! It seems so strange.”

There was nothing for it but to laugh. But what an insight into the manner in which “other people see us.”

In the Signora’s early teens her family indulged in a Dublin season, during which a very worthy prelate, the Cardinal Archbishop of her Church, died. He was full of years and good works, but at no moment of his existence remarkable for good looks.

A sprightly housemaid of the establishment demanded permission to go and visit the church where he was laid out in state. On her return the Padrona’s mother inquired how the sight had impressed her, expecting a duly pious response.

Quoth the damsel, with her brisk Dublin accent:

“Well, really, ’m, I thought the Cawdinal looked remawkably well!”

As a rule, however, the Irish lower classes are more quick to seize shades of feeling, refinements of emotion, than the poor of other races; especially—to hark back to a former page—that peasantry of the older type in which a vivid spirituality was kept alive by their faith. A chaplain has written to us from the Isle of Wight speaking of the immense consolation he had had in the presence of some Irish soldiers among the troops stationed there. “Their faith made me ashamed.”

But indeed the feeling of religion among all our men, of whatever creed, and from whatever part of the British Isles they have come, is not one of the least remarkable manifestations of the war.

“I knew I would not be killed,” said a wounded soldier beside whose bed we sat the other day. “But I knew I’d come back a better man, and I think I have.”

Then he added that the only thing that troubled them, lying in hospital, was the thought of the comrades in the thick of it, and not being able to help them.

“Of course,” he went on thoughtfully, “we can pray. We all do that, of course; we do pray, and we know that helps.”

This man was neither Irish nor Catholic.

Infinitely touching are the remarks they make, these dear fellows; beautiful sometimes in their unconscious heroism.

“Well, at least,” said the Signorina to a man permanently crippled by shrapnel, saddened by the decision that he could never go back to the front. “At least you know you’ve done your little bit.”

“Ah, but you see, miss,” he answered in all simplicity, “among us the saying goes, no one has really done his little bit till he’s underground.”

“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.