nerally dribbling in afterwards. From one small meeting
in county Waterford we came away badly disappointed, having thought an
effect was made, yet we did not take a single man. I heard later that
within the next fortnight thirty men from that parish had come in by
ones and twos to sign on--but at a town several miles away. Local
pressure, personal not political, was against us, especially that of the
mothers; and there was a shyness about taking this plunge into the
unknown.

One exception stands out, in my mind, unlike the general run of these
gatherings. It was the first field day of our brigade, when, dressed in
the khaki that had at last been served out, we mustered on the
race-course at Fermoy, five thousand strong; and I went from the review
to the train for Waterford. There was no mistaking the temper of
Redmond's constituency; we got men there in hundreds, including a score
or so of cadets--young men of education--for our special company of the
Leinsters, which was filling up fast.

At that meeting we had one force with us which was not often active on
our side. The Bishop of Waterford was strong for the war; the leading
parish priest of the town took the chair and spoke straight and plain,
while one of the Regulars, a Carmelite friar, made a speech which was
among the most eloquent that I have ever listened to.

At the beginning of April I was gazetted to a lieutenancy in the 6th
Connaught Rangers, and began to know the Division from another aspect.
Broadly speaking, the men with whom I had been sharing a hut were
Nationalist by opinion and by tradition--though by no means all
Catholics. There were Unionists, but they were few. In the society which
I now joined--a joint mess of the Royal Irish and the Rangers--matters
were different.

The personnel of the 6th Royal Irish was strongly characteristic of the
old Army. The commanding officer, Curzon, was of Irish descent, but of
little Irish association; his second in command was an Irish Protestant
gentleman of a pleasant ordinary type. The senior company commander was
an Englishman. As an offset, Willie Redmond had one company, and another
was commanded by an ex-guardsman, who had been a chief personage in the
Derry Volunteers, and brought so many of them with him that General
Parsons gave him a captaincy straight off.

In my own battalion, no Catholic had then the rank of captain. The
colonel and the adjutant belonged to well-known families in the North
o