m Mons, the first battle of Ypres, and he had
lost his arm in no battle at all; just a stray shell over the road as
they were marching back to billets. They discussed the war, the ethics
of it. Doggie still wanted to know why the realities of blood and mud
and destruction were not the true things. Gradually he found that the
Irishman meant that the true things were the spiritual, undying
things; that the grim realities would pass away; that from these dead
realities would arise the noble ideals of the future, which would be
symbolized in song and marble; that all he had endured and sacrificed
was but a part of the Great Sacrifice we were making for the Freedom
of the World. Being a man roughly educated on a Galway farm and in an
infantry regiment, he had great difficulty in co-ordinating his ideas;
but he had a curious power of vision that enabled him to pierce to the
heart of things, which he interpreted according to his untrained sense
of beauty.

They parted with expressions of mutual esteem. Doggie struck across
the Gardens with a view to returning home by Knightsbridge, Piccadilly
and Shaftesbury Avenue. He strode along, his thoughts filled with the
Irish soldier. Here was a man, maimed for life and quite content that
it should be so, who had reckoned all the horrors through which he had
passed as externals unworthy of the consideration of his unconquerable
soul; a man simple, unassuming, expansive only through his Celtic
temperament, which allowed him to talk easily to a stranger before
whom his English or Scotch comrade would have been dumb and gaping as
an oyster; obviously brave, sincere and loyal. Perhaps something even
higher. Perhaps, in essence, the very highest. The Poet-Warrior. The
term struck Doggie's brain with a thud, like the explosive fusion of
two elements.

During his walk to Kensington Gardens a poisonous current had run at
the back of his mind. Drifting on it, might he not escape? Was he not
of too fine a porcelain to mingle with the coarse and common pottery
of the ranks? Was it necessary to go into the thick of the coarse clay
vessels, just to be shattered? It was easy for Phineas to proclaim
that he found no derogation to his dignity as a man of birth and a
university graduate in identifying himself with his fellow privates.
Phineas had systematically brutalized himself into fitness for the
position. He had armed himself in brass--_aes triplex_. He smiled at
his own wit. But he, James Marma