have good lines and a timely exit.' Well, he had a brave ending to his fifth act and fell in action, and for the good lines, there could have been none better than his own 'To My Daughter Betty,' written 'on the field, before Guillemont, Somme, September 4, 1916,' telling her that when she grows up she may ask why he abandoned her to dice with death:
And oh! they 'll give you rhyme
And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
And some decry it in a knowing tone.
So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,
But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed,
And for the secret Scriptures of the poor.
That was the great cause he had at heart, and he acclaims it again in his 'Song of the Irish Armies,' which in reality is the song of all our armies, old and new. Sing the old soldiers:
...Not for this did our fathers fall,
That truth and pity and love and all
Should break in dust at a trumpet call,
