y infantry and
clattering ammunition limbers, spectacles gleaming, cap slightly awry,
while his batman (a wag) perched precariously a-top of a rocking pile of
biscuit tins, cigarette cases and boxes of tinned fruit, and shouted
after the fashion of railway porters, "By your leave! Fags for the
firin' line. Way for the Woodbine Express."

But if we saw a lot of the Padre it was the Antrims who looked upon him
as their special property. They were line infantry, of the type which
gets most of the work and none of the Press notices, a hard-bitten,
unregenerate crowd, who cared not a whit whether Belgium bled or not,
but loved fighting for its own sake and put their faith in bayonet and
butt. And wherever these Antrims went thither went the Padre also, his
harmonium and his Woodbines. I have a story that, when they were in a
certain part of the line where the trenches were only thirty yards apart
(so close indeed that the opposing forces greeted each other by their
first names and borrowed one another's wiring tools), the Padre dragged
the harmonium into the front line and held service there, and the
Germans over the way joined lustily in the hymns. He kept the men of the
Antrims going on canteen delicacies and their officers in a constant
bubble of joy. He swallowed their tall stories without a gulp; they
pulled one leg and he offered the other; he fell headlong into every
silly trap they set for him. Also they achieved merit in other messes by
peddling yarns of his wonderful innocence and his incredible
absent-mindedness.

"Came to me yesterday, the Dicky Bird did," one of them would relate;
"wanted advice about that fat fraud of his, Peter. 'He's got an abrasion
on the knob of his right-hand front paw,' says he. 'Dicky Bird,' says I,
'that is no way to describe the anatomy of a horse after all the
teaching I've given you.' 'I am so forgetful and horsey terms are so
confusing,' he moans. 'Oh, I recollect now--his starboard ankle!' The
dear babe!"

In the course of time the Antrims went into the Push, but on this
occasion they refused to take the Padre with them, explaining that
Pushes were noisy affairs with messy accidents happening in even the
best regulated battalions.

The Padre was up at midnight to see them go, his spectacles misty. They
went over the bags at dawn, reached their objective in twenty minutes
and scratched themselves in. The Padre rejoined them ten minutes later,
very badly winded, but bringing a c