wounded, and
wonderful luck to escape so lightly. The enemy suffered from "the jumps"
for several nights afterward, and threw bombs into their own barbed
wire, as though the English were out there again. And at the sound of
those bombs the West Yorks laughed all along their trenches.

IX

It was always astonishing, though afterward familiar in those
battlefields of Flanders, to find oneself in the midst of so many
nationalities and races and breeds of men belonging to that British
family of ours which sent its sons to sacrifice. In those trenches there
were all the ways of speech, all the sentiment of place and history, all
the creeds and local customs and songs of old tradition which belong to
the mixture of our blood wherever it is found about the world.

The skirl of the Scottish bagpipes was heard through all the years
of war over the Flemish marshlands, and there were Highlanders and
Lowlanders with every dialect over the border. In one line of trenches
the German soldiers listened to part-songs sung in such trained harmony
that it was as if a battalion of opera-singers had come into the
firing-line. The Welshmen spoke their own language. For a time no
officer received his command unless he spoke it as fluently as running
water by Aberystwyth, and even orders were given in this tongue until a
few Saxons, discovered in the ranks, failed to form fours and know their
left hand from their right in Welsh.

The French-Canadians did not need to learn the language of the peasants
in these market towns. Soldiers from Somerset used many old Saxon words
which puzzled their cockney friends, and the Lancashire men brought the
northern bur with them and the grit of the northern spirit. And Ireland,
though she would not have conscription, sent some of the bravest of her
boys out there, and in all the bloodiest battles since that day at Mons
the old fighting qualities of the Irish race shone brightly again, and
the blood of her race has been poured out upon these tragic fields.

One of the villages behind the lines of Arras was so crowded with Irish
boys at the beginning of '16 that I found it hard not to believe that
a part of old Ireland itself had found its way to Flanders. In one
old outhouse the cattle had not been evicted. Twelve Flemish cows lay
cuddled up together on the ground floor in damp straw, which gave out
a sweet, sickly stench, while the Irish soldiers lived upstairs in the
loft, to which they climbed