ame. There were recruits in the Irish regiments who
would forget to answer to their own names, so short had been their
acquaintance with them. Of these the Royal Mallows had their full
share; and, while they still retained their fame as being one of the
smartest corps in the army, no one knew better than their officers that
they were dry-rotted with treason and with bitter hatred of the flag
under which they served.

And the centre of all the disaffection was C Company, in which Dennis
Conolly found himself enrolled. They were Celts, Catholics, and men of
the tenant class to a man; and their whole experience of the British
Government had been an inexorable landlord, and a constabulary who
seemed to them to be always on the side of the rent-collector. Dennis
was not the only moonlighter in the ranks, nor was he alone in having an
intolerable family blood-feud to harden his heart. Savagery had
begotten savagery in that veiled civil war. A landlord with an iron
mortgage weighing down upon him had small bowels for his tenantry.
He did but take what the law allowed, and yet, with men like Jim Holan,
or Patrick McQuire, or Peter Flynn, who had seen the roofs torn from
their cottages and their folk huddled among their pitiable furniture
upon the roadside, it was ill to argue about abstract law. What matter
that in that long and bitter struggle there was many another outrage on
the part of the tenant, and many another grievance on the side of the
landowner! A stricken man can only feel his own wound, and the rank and
file of the C Company of the Royal Mallows were sore and savage to the
soul. There were low whisperings in barrack-rooms and canteens,
stealthy meetings in public-house parlours, bandying of passwords from
mouth to mouth, and many other signs which made their officers right
glad when the order came which sent them to foreign, and better still,
to active service.

For Irish regiments have before now been disaffected, and have at a
distance looked upon the foe as though he might, in truth, be the
friend; but when they have been put face on to him, and when their
officers have dashed to the front with a wave and halloo, those rebel
hearts have softened and their gallant Celtic blood has boiled with the
mad Joy of the fight, until the slower Britons have marvelled that they
ever could have doubted the loyalty of their Irish comrades. So it
would be again, according to the officers, and so it would not be if