pass the first dressing-station.  Here, indeed, he was under terrible shell fire and saw many of his comrades struck down; but he was not content.  For this new battle he insisted that he must be in the actual advance.  If he were refused leave, he said he would break all discipline and take it.  He was permitted to be with the third attacking wave; but he slipped forward and joined the first, on the right, where the line touched the Ulstermen.  So it happened that when he fell, struck by two rifle bullets, the stretcher-bearers who helped him and carried him down to the dressing-station were those of an Ulster regiment.  He was brought back to the hospital in the convent at Locre, familiar to all of us by many memories; for the nuns kept a restaurant for officers in the refectory, and he and I had dined there more than once with leading men of the Ulster Division.  His wounds were not grave; but he had overtaxed himself, and in a few hours he succumbed to shock.  It was the death that he had foreseen, that he had almost desired—­a death that many might have envied him.  He had said more than once since the rebellion that he thought he could best serve Ireland by dying; and in the sequel, so deep was the impression left by his death that it seemed at times as if his thought had been true.

Yet one aspect of it was overlooked by many—­the loss inflicted on his brother, the Irish leader.  It was not merely that Redmond lost the sole near kinsman of his generation; he lost in him the closest of those comrades who had been allied with him in all the stages of his life’s fight.  The veterans of the old party had been vanishing rapidly from the scene; name succeeded name quickly on our death-roll.  This death left Redmond lonely, and sorely stricken in his affections.  But it did more.  It deprived him of a counsellor, and perhaps the only counsellor he had who temperamentally shared his own point of view.  More especially now in the war, when the leader’s wisdom in giving the lead which he had given began to be gravely questioned even by his own supporters, it was invaluable for him to have backing from one who had taken the war as part of his life’s creed—­who knew no hesitancies, no reserves in his conviction that the right course had been followed, for the right thing was to do the right.  Finally and chiefly, Willie Redmond was the only man who could break through his brother’s constitutional reserve and could force him into discussion.  In the months that were to come such a man was badly needed.  The loss of him meant to John Redmond a loss of personal efficiency.  Sorrow gave a strong grip to depression on a brooding mind which had always a proneness to melancholy, which was now linked with a sick body, and which lived among disappointments and grief and the sense of rancorous dislike in men who once thought it a privilege to cheer him on his passing.

Add to all this that Redmond’s one hope for Ireland now lay in the Convention, and that he collated with good reason on his soldier brother’s influence there—­as no man could fail to do who had seen the effect which his last speech produced upon the House of Commons.