sident Kruger, who told him that
"he would never forget how the Irish Brigade stood by the men of the
Transvaal in their hour of need."

Captain William Redmond, M.P., now in the trenches with the British
Army, had also been a delegate from Ireland, and had seen Oom Paul at
the Hague in much the same spirit of sympathy; but then Home Rule was
not upon the Statute Book, and if that "scrap of paper" bound England,
it was certainly no less binding upon Ireland, in that it had been
freely entered into by her constitutional representatives.

Probably McBride thought of the motto inscribed upon the flag that the
Irish Brigade had used (later presented him by one of the officials of
the Boer Republic), which ran:--

"'Tis better to have fought and lost
Than never to have fought at all."

In any case his attitude remained exactly what it had been in 1909, when
at the Manchester Martyr celebration he had appealed to his audience
never to degrade themselves by entering the British Army, telling them
that if ever they wished to fight they ought to wait for the prospect of
a German invasion of Ireland.

One of the strangest figures in the rebel ranks was that of the famous
Countess Markievicz--formerly a Miss Gore-Booth, daughter of Sir H. W.
Gore-Booth, the head of a well-known and respected Sligo family of
Cromwellian descent.

It was while in Paris as an art student some fifteen years ago that she
imbibed those extreme principles of democracy--almost, one might say,
anarchy--with which her name became associated on her return to Dublin
after her marriage with a young Polish artist named Count Marckievicz.

Presented at Court, she was not fond of the conventional "society"
circles of the Irish capital, and lived for the most part a Bohemian
life of her own, becoming notorious by her extreme socialistic opinions.

During the Larkin crisis, when the transport workers and dockers went
out on strike, she opened a "soup kitchen" at Liberty Hall.

She was also responsible for the organization of the "National Boy
Scouts," an Irish replica of the English original, with a political
bias, of course; and these soon attracted hundreds of Dublin lads, and
from time to time the Countess would give them lectures and hold reviews
and inspections.

These formed a considerable portion of the Citizen Army, and were
probably the most violent of those elements in the Republic who
disgraced the otherwise remarkable "military