Naturally, he looked in at the House of Commons, and realized for the first time how uneasy well-informed persons in the lobbies were about the chances of the war.

Everybody who ever came home from the front must have experienced the effect of that strange transition from unquestioning confidence to worried anxiety; but Willie Redmond was the only man who ever adequately gave expression to it.
It was on the eve of St.Patrick's Day, and the Army Estimates were under discussion in a very thin House--a wrangling, fault-finding debate.

In the middle of it Willie Redmond got up, and said that as he was not likely to be there again, he had one or two things to say which he thought the House would be glad to know.

Speaking as one of the oldest members, who had all but completed his thirty-third year in Parliament, he told them that every soul in the House should be proud of the troops--not of the Irish troops, but of the troops generally--because more than anything else of the splendid spirit in which they were going through the privations and dangers,--which he described with passion.

If he were to deliver a message from the troops, he knew well what it would be: "Send us out the reinforcements which are necessary, and which are naturally necessary.