"Are you
Irishmen? Are you soldiers? What are you here for but to fight for
your country?"
"England is no country of ours," cried several.
"You are not fighting for England. You are fighting for Ireland, and
for the Empire of which it as part."
"A black curse on the Impire!" shouted Private McQuire, throwing down
his rifle. "'Twas the Impire that backed the man that druv me onto the
roadside. May me hand stiffen before I draw trigger for it.
"What's the Impire to us, Captain Foley, and what's the Widdy to us
ayther?" cried a voice.
"Let the constabulary foight for her."
"Ay, be God, they'd be better imployed than pullin' a poor man's thatch
about his ears."
"Or shootin' his brother, as they did mine."
"It was the Impire laid my groanin' mother by the wayside. Her son will
rot before he upholds it, and ye can put that in the charge-sheet in the
next coort-martial."
In vain the three officers begged, menaced, persuaded. The square was
still moving, ever moving, with the same bloody fight raging in its
entrails. Even while they had been speaking they had been shuffling
backwards, and the useless Gardner, with her slaughtered crew, was
already a good hundred yards from them. And the pace was accelerating.
The mass of men, tormented and writhing, was trying, by a common
instinct, to reach some clearer ground where they could re-form.
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