Everywhere we went we had friendly and even enthusiastic audiences; the only place where I met any suggestion of hostility was at Killarney, and there it took the form of avoiding our meeting.  We were cheered and encouraged—­but we did not get many recruits, so to say, on the nail.  Yet they came, generally dribbling in afterwards.  From one small meeting in county Waterford we came away badly disappointed, having thought an effect was made, yet we did not take a single man.  I heard later that within the next fortnight thirty men from that parish had come in by ones and twos to sign on—­but at a town several miles away.  Local pressure, personal not political, was against us, especially that of the mothers; and there was a shyness about taking this plunge into the unknown.

One exception stands out, in my mind, unlike the general run of these gatherings.  It was the first field day of our brigade, when, dressed in the khaki that had at last been served out, we mustered on the race-course at Fermoy, five thousand strong; and I went from the review to the train for Waterford.  There was no mistaking the temper of Redmond’s constituency; we got men there in hundreds, including a score or so of cadets—­young men of education—­for our special company of the Leinsters, which was filling up fast.

At that meeting we had one force with us which was not often active on our side.  The Bishop of Waterford was strong for the war; the leading parish priest of the town took the chair and spoke straight and plain, while one of the Regulars, a Carmelite friar, made a speech which was among the most eloquent that I have ever listened to.

At the beginning of April I was gazetted to a lieutenancy in the 6th Connaught Rangers, and began to know the Division from another aspect.  Broadly speaking, the men with whom I had been sharing a hut were Nationalist by opinion and by tradition—­though by no means all Catholics.  There were Unionists, but they were few.  In the society which I now joined—­a joint mess of the Royal Irish and the Rangers—­matters were different.

The personnel of the 6th Royal Irish was strongly characteristic of the old Army.  The commanding officer, Curzon, was of Irish descent, but of little Irish association; his second in command was an Irish Protestant gentleman of a pleasant ordinary type.  The senior company commander was an Englishman.  As an offset, Willie Redmond had one company, and another was commanded by an ex-guardsman, who had been a chief personage in the Derry Volunteers, and brought so many of them with him that General Parsons gave him a captaincy straight off.

In my own battalion, no Catholic had then the rank of captain.  The colonel and the adjutant belonged to well-known families in the North of Ireland, deeply involved in Covenanting politics.  My own company commander was a very gallant little Dublin barrister, who, before the war, had exerted on English platforms against Home Rule the gift of racy eloquence which he now devoted to recruiting.  Not half a dozen of the subalterns would have described themselves as Nationalists.