his good deeds advertised. I
shall call him J. He was a typical Irishman--in looks, manner, and
character one of the most Irishmen I have ever met. He had a
wonderful talent for dealing with young animals. The very first time
I met him he took me to see a puppy, a large, rather savage-looking
creature which he kept in a stable outside the camp. One of the
creature's four grandparents had been a wolf. J. hoped to make the
puppy a useful member of society.

"I am never happy," he said, "unless I have some young thing to
train--dog, horse, anything. That's the reason I'm so keen on doing
something for these boys."

J. had no easy job when he took up the cause of the boys. It was not
that he had to struggle against active opposition. There was no
active opposition. Every one wanted to help. The authorities realised
that something ought to be done. What J. was up against was system,
the fact that he and the boys and the authorities and every one of us
were parts of a machine and the wheels of the thing would only go
round one way.

Trying to get anything of an exceptional kind done in the army is
like floundering in a trench full of sticky mud--one is inclined
sometimes to say sticky muddle--surrounded by dense entanglements of
barbed red-tape. You track authority from place to place, finding
always that the man you want, the ultimate person who can actually
give the permission you require, lies just beyond. If you are
enormously persevering, and, nose to scent, you hunt on for years,
you find yourself at last back with the man from whom you started,
having made a full circle of all the authorities there are. Then, if
you like, you can start again.

I do not know how J. managed the early stages of the business. He had
made a good start long before I joined him. But only an Irishman, I
think, could have done the thing at all. Only an Irishman is profane
enough to mock at the great god System, the golden image before which
we are all bidden to fall down and worship "what time we hear the
sound of" military music. Only an Irishman will venture
light-heartedly to take short cuts through regulations. It is our
capacity for doing things the wrong way which makes us valuable to
the Empire, and they ought to decorate us oftener than they do for
our insubordination.

There was an Irishman, so I am told, in the very early days of the
war who created hospital trains for our wounded by going about the
French railways at night w