who had come fresh to the
trenches, some of those boys who had not guessed the realities of war
until then. But they came out proudly--"with their tails up," said one
of their officers--after their baptism of fire.

The drum-and-fife band of the Munsters was practising in an old barn on
the wayside, and presently, in honor of visitors--who were myself and
another--the pipers were sent for. They were five tall lads, who came
striding down the street of Flemish cottages, with the windbags under
their arms, and then, with the fife men sitting on the straw around
them and the drummers standing with their sticks ready, they took their
breath for "the good old Irish tune" demanded by the captain.

It was a tune which men could not sing very safely in Irish yesterdays,
and it held the passion of many rebellious hearts and the yearning of
them.

Oh, Paddy dear, and did you hear the news that's going round? The
shamrock is forbid by law to grow on Irish ground.

She's the most distressful country that ever yet was seen; They're
hanging men and women there for wearing of the green.

Then the pipers played the "March of O'Neill," a wild old air as
shrill and fierce as the spirit of the men who came with their Irish
battle-cries against Elizabeth's pikemen and Cromwell's Ironsides.

I thought then that the lads who still stayed back in Ireland, and the
old people there, would have been glad to stand with me outside that
Flemish barn and to hear the old tunes of their race played by the boys
who were out there fighting.

I think they would have wept a little, as I saw tears in the eyes of an
Irish soldier by my side, for it was the spirit of Ireland herself,
with all her poetry, and her valor, and her faith in liberty, which came
crying from those pipes, and I wished that the sound of them could carry
across the sea.

That was a year before I saw the Irish battalions come out of Guichy,
a poor remnant of the strength that had gone in, all tattered and torn,
and caked with the filth of battle, and hardly able to stagger along.
But they pulled themselves up a little, and turned eyes left when they
passed their brigadier, who called out words of praise to them.

It was more than a year later than that when I saw the last of them,
after a battle in Flanders, when they were massacred, and lay in heaps
round German redoubts, up there in the swamps.

X

Early in the morning of February 23d there was a clear sky with a