He was on foot as always, for he never could be persuaded to ride while the men were marching, and I never saw more geniality of greeting on any countenance than was on his when he came up with outstretched hand to where I was sitting by the roadside—­for we had halted to see them go by.  Here was a man utterly in his element, radiant literally in the enthusiasm of his devotion.  He refused to listen to our talk of the bad time we had been through in the place where they were to succeed us (and in two winters of that war I never saw worse); all his talk was of the good time which we should have in the billets we were going to, which they had just left.  Back there, in and about Allouagne, they rejoined us; and I remember dining with him in his company mess and hearing his eulogies of the splendid fellows that his company officers were.  Then, about 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