and he wisely avoided it. He spoke for a
nation to which autonomy had been accorded by statute; he preferred men
to feel for themselves rather than be asked to admit that no
self-governing nation will submit voluntarily to the imposition of the
blood-tax without its own most formal consent. All that he said was, in
effect: You have Ireland with you for the first time, by our assistance;
do not destroy our power to continue that assistance, do not alienate
Ireland. In the counsels of the Empire his argument prevailed; and
during the early months of 1916 the relations between Great Britain and
Ireland were better and happier than at any time of which history holds
record. An utterance from one Irishman, and the general response to it,
showed this in extraordinary degree.

Our Division, or rather two brigades of it, had detrained in France on
the 19th of December; the first impression as we shook ourselves
together for the march to strange billets was the sound of guns.
Scattered about in different villages lying round Bethune, our
battalions passed the next two months in the usual training before we
should take up our own sector of the line, and we saw little or nothing
of each other. March found us engaged, though still only attached by
companies to more seasoned troops, in some rough crater-fighting on the
ugly mine-riddled stretch between Loos and Hulluch. It was when we were
marching out from broken houses about the minehead at Annequin that we
first met again our old stable companions, the Royal Irish--and that I
first saw Willie Redmond in France at the head of his company.

He was on foot as always, for he never could be persuaded to ride while
the men were marching, and I never saw more geniality of greeting on any
countenance than was on his when he came up with outstretched hand to
where I was sitting by the roadside--for we had halted to see them go
by. Here was a man utterly in his element, radiant literally in the
enthusiasm of his devotion. He refused to listen to our talk of the bad
time we had been through in the place where they were to succeed us (and
in two winters of that war I never saw worse); all his talk was of the
good time which we should have in the billets we were going to, which
they had just left. Back there, in and about Allouagne, they rejoined
us; and I remember dining with him in his company mess and hearing his
eulogies of the splendid fellows that his company officers were. Then,
about