Yesterday I asked a woman on the Echtge hills, if any of her neighbours
had gone to the war. She said: 'No; but I know a great many that went to
America when the war began--even boys that had business to do at home;
they were afraid of being brought away by the Press.' On another part of
the Echtge hills, where a rumour had come that the police were to be
sent to the war, an old woman said to a policeman I know: 'When you go
out there, don't be killing the people of my religion.' He said: 'The
Boers are not of your religion'; but she said: 'They are; I know they
must be Catholics, or the English would not be against them.' Others on
that wild range think that this is the beginning of the great war that
will end in the final rout of the enemies of Ireland. Old prophecies say
this war is to come at the meeting of these centuries; and there is an
old Irish verse which seems to allude to this, and which has been thus
translated:--
'When the Lion shall lose its strength,
And the bracket Thistle begin to pine,
The Harp shall sound sweet, sweet, at length,
Between the eight and the nine.'
Lonely Echtge still keeps old prophecies and old songs and some of the
old speech, and but few newspapers are seen there; but on the lowland,
sympathy with the Boers, and prophecies of their victory, are put into
the doggerel English verse that must be poor in form, because a ballad,
more than another song, must have a long tradition of folk-thought and
folk-expression behind it; and in Ireland this tradition does not belong
to the English language. Even the beautiful air of 'The Wearing of the
Green' cannot give poetic charm to such verses as these, which, like the
others that follow, have been sung and sold by ballad-singers in
market-towns and at fairs, and at country race-meetings, during the last
year:--
'Oh! Paddy dear, and did ye hear
The news that's going round?
No cheers for brave Paul Kruger
Must be heard on Irish ground.
No more the English tourist at
Killarney will be seen,
Unless you join the pirate's cause,
And chant "God save the Queen."'