A Long Long Way Read Free Page B

told her it was because he loved her he had to go, that there were women like her being killed by the Germans in Belgium, and how could he let that happen? Gretta did not understand. He said he would go to please his father also and though she did understand that, she thought it a poor enough reason. He told her her own father would be in the fight now, and she pointed out that he was part of the garrison at the Curragh, and she didn’t think he would be sent to France.
    But he knew he must play his part, and when he came home he would not be remorseful, but content in his heart that he had followed his own mind.
    ‘Your Da said himself we have to know our own minds,’ he said.
    ‘That’s only a thing he got out of a little book he reads. St Thomas Aquinas, Willie. That’s all,’ she said.

Chapter Two
    Willie Dunne was not the only one. Why, he read in the newspaper that men who spoke only Gallic came down to the lowlands of Scotland to enlist, men of the Aran Islands that spoke only their native Irish rowed over to Galway. Public schoolboys from Winchester and Marlborough, boys of the Catholic University School and Belvedere and Blackrock College in Dublin. High-toned critics of Home Rule from the rainy Ulster counties, and Catholic men of the South alarmed for Belgian nun and child. Recruiting sergeants of all the British world wrote down names in a hundred languages, a thousand dialects. Swahili, Urdu, Irish, Bantu, the click languages of the Bushmen, Cantonese, Australian, Arabic.
    He knew it was Lord Kitchener himself who had called for volunteers. And John Redmond the Irish leader had echoed the call, down at Woodenbridge in Wicklow. There was a long account of the matter in the Irish Times. A fierce little river flowed under him as he spoke, and a countryside all beautiful and thunderous with wood-pigeons and leaping waters flew up about his ears, for he spoke his speech in a ravine. The Parliament in London had said there would be Home Rule for Ireland at the end of the war, therefore, said John Redmond, Ireland was for the first time in seven hundred years in effect a country. So she could go to war as a nation at last - nearly - in the sure and solemnly given promise of self-rule. The British would keep their promise and Ireland must shed her blood generously.
    Of course, the Ulsterman joined up in the selfsame army for an opposite reason, and an opposite end. Perhaps that was curious, but there it was. It was to prevent Home Rule they joined - so his father said, with fervent approval. And many to the south of them in those days felt the same. It was a deep, dark maze of intentions, anyhow.
    Willie read about these things in the company of his father, because it was their habit to read the paper together in the evening and comment on the various items, almost like a married couple.
    Willie Dunne’s father, in the privacy of his policeman’s quarters in Dublin Castle, was of the opinion that Redmond’s speech was the speech of a scoundrel. Willie’s father was in the Masons though he was a Catholic, and on top of that he was a member of the South Wicklow Lodge. It was King and Country and Empire he said a man should go and fight for, never thinking that his son Willie would go so soon as he did.
    Willie had never reached six feet. How proud he was now to go to the recruiting officer who was lodged just outside the castle yard in quite a handy way, and be signed up, his height never in question. For if he could not be a policeman, he could be a soldier.
    But when he came home that night and told his father, the big, blank, broad face of the policeman wept in the darkness.
    And then his three sisters, Maud, Annie and Dolly, lit the candles in the sitting-room and they all felt part of the tremendous enterprise because Willie was going to be in it, and they were proud and excited, though it might last a few weeks at most, because the Germans were known to be only murderous cowards. Dolly at that time was