Kentucky thought often over the Battle Hymn in the long waking hours of pain and the listless time of convalescence, and since his thoughts came in time to crystallize into words and words are easier to set down than thoughts, here is a talk that he had, many weeks after, when he was almost well again—or rather as well as he would ever be.

The talk was with Larry, with the broken wreck of a Larry who would never, as the doctors told him, walk or stand upright again. Kentucky had finished his convalescing at Larry’s home, and the talk came one night when they were alone together in the big dining-room, Larry, thin-faced and claw-handed, on a couch before the fire, Kentucky in a deep armchair. They had chatted idly and in broken snatches of old days, and of those last desperate days in “the Push,” and on a chance mention of Pug both had fallen silent for a space.

276

“Poor Pug,” said Larry at last. “Did it ever strike you, Kentuck, what a queer quartette of chums we were, Billy Simson and Pug and you and me?”

“Yes, mighty queer, come to think of it,” agreed Kentucky. “And the game handed it out pretty rough for the lot of us—Billy and Pug killed, you like this, and me ...” and he had lifted the stump of a hand bound about with black silk bandages and showing nothing but a thumb and the stump of a finger. “And I figure that out of the lot yours is maybe the worst.”

“I don’t know,” said Larry slowly. “I’m well enough off, after all, with a good home and my people asking nothing better than to have the looking after of me. I always think Billy had the hardest luck to be hit again just as he was coming out of it all with a safe and cushy one.”

“Anyway,” said Kentucky, “it’s a sure thing I came out best. I’m crippled, of course, but I’m not right out of action, and can still play a little hand in the game.”

“That’s right,” said Larry heartily. “You’re fit enough to tackle the job in his office in my place that the Pater’s so keen to have you take—and as I am, selfishly, because the offer carries the condition277 that you live with us. I hope you’ve decided to sign on with the firm?”

“I’m going to tell your father to-night,” said Kentucky very slowly. “But I’m glad to have the chance to tell you first. I asked him to give me a day to think it over because I wanted to know first if I’d a good-enough reason for refusing——”

“Refusing,” Larry said, and almost cried the word.

“When I went out this morning,” said Kentucky quietly, “I went to the Red Cross people and had a talk with Kendrick. I showed him I was fit enough for the job and he asked me if I’d take an ambulance car to drive up front.”

Larry stared at him. “Up front again,” he gasped. “Haven’t you had enough of the front?”

“More than enough,” said Kentucky gravely. “I’m not going because I like it, any more than I did in the first place. It’s just because I think I ought to play out the game.”

“God,” said Larry. “As if you hadn’t done enough. You’ve got your discharge as unfit. Who would ever blame you for not going back, or dream you ought to go?”

“Only one man,” said Kentucky with the glimmer278 of a smile, “but one that counts a smart lot with me; and he’s—myself.”

“But it’s nonsense,” said Larry desperately. “Why, it’s not even as if you were one of us. After all, you’re American, and this country has no claim, never had a claim, on you. You’ve done more than your share already. There isn’t an earthly reason why you should go again.”

“Not even one of us,” repeated Kentucky softly. “Well, now, haven’t I earned the right to call myself one of you? No, never mind; course I know you didn’t mean it that way. But you’re wrong otherwise, boy. I’m not an American now. If you folks went to war with America to-morrow, and I was fit to fight, I’d have to fight on your side. There was an oath I took to serve your King, when I enlisted, you’ll remember.”

“No one would expect an oath like that to bind you to fight against your own people,” said Larry quickly.

“In Kentucky, boy,” said Kentucky gently, his speech running, as it always did when he was stirred into the slurred, soft “r”-less drawl of his own South, “an oath is an oath, and a promise is little sho’t of it. I fought foh yoh country because I thought yoh country was right. But I279 come at last to fight foh her, because I’ve got to be proud of her and of belonging to her. And I want to pay the best bit of respect I can think of to those men I fought along with. It just pleases me some to think poor old Pug and Billy and a right smart mo’ we knew would like it—I’m going to take out naturalization papers just as soon as I can do it.”

“Like it,” said Larry, with his eyes glistening; “why, yes, I think they’d like it.”

Kentucky hesitated a little, then went on slowly: “And theh’s some verses I know that have so’t of come to map out a route fo’ me to follow. Oveh theh those verses stood right up an’ spoke to me. I’ve thought it oveh quite a lot since, an’ it’s sure plain to me that I was made to see how close they fitted to what I could see, an’ heah, an’ undehstand, just so I could use the otheh verses to show me otheh things I could not undehstand. I’d like to tell yo’ some of those verses an’ how they come in.”

He told first the picture he had seen of the German prisoners searching amongst their own heaped dead, while the British guard stood watching them, and the sky flickered with “the fateful lightning” and the guns growled their triumph280 song; and then went on and repeated the verse of the Battle Hymn, “Mine eyes have seen——”

“You see just how exact it fitted,” he said. “But it wasn’t only in that. Theh were otheh lines”; and he went on to tell of the journey back from the advanced............