"My husband was in the war of the Crimea. It is terrible the hardships
he went through, to be two months without going into a house, under the
snow in trenches. And no food to get, maybe a biscuit in the day. And
there was enough food there, he said, to feed all Ireland; but bad
management, they could not get it. Coffee they would be given, and they
would be cutting a green bramble to strive to make a fire to boil it.
The dead would be buried every morning; a big hole would be dug, and the
bodies thrown in, and lime upon them; and some of the bodies would be
living when they were buried. My husband used to try to revive them if
he saw there was life in them, but other lads wouldn't care--just to put
them down and have done. And they were allowed to take nothing--money,
gold watches, and the like, all thrown in the ground. Sure they did not
care much about such things, they might be lying in the same place
themselves to-morrow. But the soldiers would take the money sometimes
and put it in their stocking and tie the stocking below the ankle and
below the knee. But if the officer knew that, they would be
courtmartialed and punished. He got two medals--one from the English and
one from the Emperor of Turkey. Fighting for the Queen, and bad pay she
gave him. He never knew what was the war for, unless it might be for
diminishing the population. We saw in the paper a few years ago there
was a great deal of money collected for soldiers that had gone through
hardship in the war, and we wrote to the War Office asking some of it
for him. But they wrote back that there were so many young men crippled
in the Boer war there was nothing to be spared for the old. My husband
used to be saying the Queen cared nothing for the army, but that the
King, even before he was King, was better to it. But I'm thinking from
this out the King will get very few from Ireland for his army."
[Illustration: W.E. GLADSTONE]