the time we moved up into trenches, our first leaves began and he
got home in March. Naturally, he looked in at the House of Commons, and
realized for the first time how uneasy well-informed persons in the
lobbies were about the chances of the war. Everybody who ever came home
from the front must have experienced the effect of that strange
transition from unquestioning confidence to worried anxiety; but Willie
Redmond was the only man who ever adequately gave expression to it.

It was on the eve of St. Patrick's Day, and the Army Estimates were
under discussion in a very thin House--a wrangling, fault-finding
debate. In the middle of it Willie Redmond got up, and said that as he
was not likely to be there again, he had one or two things to say which
he thought the House would be glad to know. Speaking as one of the
oldest members, who had all but completed his thirty-third year in
Parliament, he told them that every soul in the House should be proud of
the troops--not of the Irish troops, but of the troops
generally--because more than anything else of the splendid spirit in
which they were going through the privations and dangers,--which he
described with passion. If he were to deliver a message from the troops,
he knew well what it would be:

"Send us out the reinforcements which are necessary, and which are
naturally necessary. Send us out, as we admit you have been doing
up to this, the necessary supplies, and when you do that, have
trust in the men who are in the gap to conduct the war to the
victory which everyone at the front is confident is bound to come.
'And when victory does come,' the message would run on, 'you in the
House of Commons, in the country, and in every newspaper in the
country, can spend the rest of your lives in discussing as to
whether the victory has been won on proper lines or whether it has
not.' Nothing in the world can depress the spirits of the men that
I have seen at the front. I do not believe that there was ever
enough Germans born into this world to depress them. If it were
possible to depress them at all, it can only be done by pursuing a
course of embittered controversy in this country--as to which was
the right way or the wrong way of conducting affairs at the front.
When a man feels that his feet are freezing, when he is standing in
heavy rain for a whole night with no shelter, and when next morni