Tales of War eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 101 pages of information about Tales of War.

Tales of War eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 101 pages of information about Tales of War.
girls that could get no other jobs; but a child looks for those things in a tale that are simple and noble and epic, the things that Earth remembers.  And so they tell, over there, tales of Sarsfield and of the old Irish Brigade; they tell, of an evening, of Owen Roe O’Neill.  And into those tales come the plains of Flanders again and the ancient towns of France, towns famous long ago and famous yet:  let us rather think of them as famous names and not as the sad ruins we have seen, melancholy by day and monstrous in the moonlight.

Many an Irishman who sails from America for those historic lands knows that the old trees that stand there have their roots far down in soil once richened by Irish blood.  When the Boyne was lost and won, and Ireland had lost her King, many an Irishman with all his wealth in a scabbard looked upon exile as his sovereign’s court.  And so they came to the lands of foreign kings, with nothing to offer for the hospitality that was given them but a sword; and it usually was a sword with which kings were well content.  Louis XV had many of them, and was glad to have them at Fontenoy; the Spanish King admitted them to the Golden Fleece; they defended Maria Theresa.  Landen in Flanders and Cremona knew them.  A volume were needed to tell of all those swords; more than one Muse has remembered them.  It was not disloyalty that drove them forth; their King was gone, they followed, the oak was smitten and brown were the leaves of the tree.

But no such mournful metaphor applies to the men who march to-day towards the plains where the ``Wild Geese’’ were driven.  They go with no country mourning them, but their whole land cheers them on; they go to the inherited battlefields.  And there is this difference in their attitude to kings, that those knightly Irishmen of old, driven homeless over-sea, appeared as exiles suppliant for shelter before the face of the Grand Monarch, and he, no doubt with exquisite French grace, gave back to them all they had lost except what was lost forever, salving so far as he could the injustice suffered by each.  But to-day when might, for its turn, is in the hands of democracies, the men whose fathers built the Statue of Liberty have left their country to bring back an exiled king to his home, and to right what can be righted of the ghastly wrongs of Flanders.

And if men’s prayers are heard, as many say, old saints will hear old supplications going up by starlight with a certain wistful, musical intonation that has linked the towns of Limerick and Cork with the fields of Flanders before.

The Movement

For many years Eliphaz Griggs was comparatively silent.  Not that he did not talk on all occasions whenever he could find hearers, he did that at great length; but for many years he addressed no public meeting, and was no part of the normal life of the northeast end of Hyde Park or Trafalgar Square.  And then one day he was talking in a public house where he had gone to talk on the only subject that was dear to him.  He waited, as was his custom, until five or six men were present, and then he began. ``Ye’re all damned, I’m saying, damned from the day you were born.  Your portion is Tophet.’’

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Project Gutenberg
Tales of War from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.