Crews and
Jordan and Saxon and men like them, who were of his mind and would work
patiently at dull things in the hope of getting an ordered community.
Railways! One had to get the Irish railways reorganised and grouped. If
one could solve the problem of traffic, so that the East and West and
North and South of Ireland would be as accessible to each other as the
East and West and North and South of England, one would have made a
large movement towards a better state....

That was what he would do. He would help to construct things, not to
destroy them. He was not afraid to go to the war ... that was not the
reason why he was resolving that he would refuse to be a soldier. It was
because he could do better, finer work by living for Ireland than by
dying for England. People throughout Europe were already perturbed at
the waste of potential men in war ... wondering whether, after all, it
was a wise thing to let rare men, men of unique gifts go to war. Was it
really wise of England to let such a man as Gilbert Farlow, with the
rare gift of comedy, be lost in that haphazard manner? Ninian had had
the potentialities of a great engineer. Would it not have been wiser to
have kept him to his railway-building than to have let him fall, as he
fell, to the bullet of a sniper?... Already people were asking such
questions as these. If he were to go out, and were to be killed, would
they not say, "This man had gifts that marked him out from other men. We
ought not to have wasted him!" Well, why should he be wasted? He was not
afraid. He insisted that he was not afraid. It needed high courage to
stand up and say, "I am a man of special gift and I will not let that
gift be wasted in war!" That, in effect, was what he was preparing to
do. People would speak behind his back ... speak even to his face ...
and call him a coward! Well, let them do so....

3

But in his heart, he knew that he was afraid to go. Almost he deceived
himself into believing that he was behaving well in refusing to join the
Army so that he might devote himself more assiduously to Ireland and his
work ... but not completely did he persuade himself. The fear of death
was in him and he could not allay it. The fear of mutilation, of
madness, of blindness, of shattered nerves sent him shuddering from the
thought of offering himself as a soldier ... and mixed up with this
devastating fear was a queer vanity that almost conquered the fear.

"If I were to go in, I mig