Part 10

Everywhere you find that the one cry of the soldiers who are invalided home--they are impatient to be cured quickly and get back “to have another slap at them.” We know how our women here at home share that eager enthusiasm in this the most righteous war Britain has ever gone into; and isn’t there something that stirs you like the sound of a trumpet in such a passage as this from the letter a Scottish nun living in Belgium has written to her mother?

“I am glad England is aroused, and that the British lion is out with all his teeth showing. Here these little lions of Belgians are raging mad and doing glorious things.

“Tell father I am cheery, and feel sometimes far too warlike for a nun. That’s my Scottish blood. I hope to goodness the Highlanders, if they come, will march down another street on their way to the caserne, or I shall shout and yell and cheer them, and forget I mustn’t look out of the window.”

An extract from Sergeant T. Cahill’s letter to his friends at Bristol gives you a snap-shot of our women in the firing line, and of the fearless jollity and light-heartedness with which our Irish comrades meet the worst that their enemies can do:

“The Red Cross girleens, with their purty faces and their sweet ways, are as good men as most of us, and better than some of us. They are not supposed to venture into the firing line at all, but they get there all the same, and devil the one of us durst turn them away,” and he goes on casually, “Mick Clancy is that droll with his larking and bamboozling the Germans that he makes us nearly split our sides laughing at him and his ways. Yesterday he got a stick and put a cap on it so that it peeped above the trenches just like a man, and then the Germans kept shooting away at it until they must have used up tons of ammunition, and there was us all the time laughing at them.”

But I think there is perhaps nothing in these letters that is more touching or more finely significant than this:

“The other day I stopped to assist a young lad of the West Kents, who had been badly hit by a piece of shell,” writes Corporal Sam Haslett. “He hadn’t long to live, and knew it, but he wasn’t at all put out about it. I asked him if there was any message I could take to any one at home, and the poor lad’s eyes filled with tears as he answered: ‘I ran away from home and ’listed a year ago. Mother and dad don’t know I’m here, but you tell them that I’m not sorry I did it.’ When I told our boys afterwards, they cried like babies, but, mind you, that’s the spirit that’s going to pull England through this war. I got his name and the address of his people from his regiment, and I am writing to tell them that they have every reason to be proud of their lad. He may have run away from home, but he didn’t run away from the Germans.”

And if you have caught the buoyant, heroic ardour that rings through those careless, unstudied notes our gallant fellows have written home, you know that there is not a man in the firing line who will.

_Wyman & Sons Ltd., Printers, London and Reading._

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

Page 68: “smoking concerts” probably should be “smoking, concerts”.

Page 72: “from Mons, It was” was punctuated and capitalized that way.

Page 150: “1.0 p.m.” was printed that way.

End of Project Gutenberg's In The Firing Line, by A. St. John Adcock