The Volunteer
The gunfire split the still night air,
and from my side the blood flowed red.
Informer's work had been well done; an ambush had been laid.
My comrades turned back to my aid. I waved them on again.
Escape for me was hopeless. Why should they die in vain?
The soldiers soon around me stood. Their unit I could guess.
Their blackened faces could not disguise the hated SAS.
"Finish him off." I heard one say as a gun moved toward my head.
"Tomorrow they'll all sing about another fenian dead."
"Just drop those guns down gently," a voice came from the dark.
They wheeled and fired a volley, but it seemed they missed their mark.
The stranger stood before them now with eyes that seemed alight.
The cowards turned and quickly fled as he raised his armalite.
His face somewhere I'd seen before, but I couldn't tell just where,
but I knew from his green battledress he was a volunteer.
He never said a word to me as we moved off through the night.
I was hoisted 'cross his shoulders, a burden which seemed light.
"You'll be safe here," at last he said , as a cottage door drew near.
"They're friends of mine, though we haven't met for many a lonely year.
He laid me gently down beside a wall of slate and stone.
I turned to thank my comrade brave, but found I was alone.
When next I woke, I found myself with a family staunch and true.
I told them of my comrade strange, but it seemed they already knew.
I gazed upon that parlour wall and things came clear at last,
and I thought of songs and stories heard often in the past,
and I knew then that our struggle was a fight we could not lose
for beneath his picture there I read " IN MEMORY OF FRANCIS HUGHES."
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The traditions of the Irish people are the oldest of any race in Europe north and west of the Alps, and they themselves are the longest settled on their own soil
- Edmund Curtis (A History of Ireland: From Earliest Times to 1922)
The Irish are one of the most ancient nations that I know of at this end of the world, and are from as mighty a race as the world ever brought forth.
For it is certain that Ireland hath had the use of letters very anciently and long before England; that they had letters anciently is nothing doubtful, for the Saxons of England are said to have their letters and learning, and learned men, from the Irish.
- Edmund Spenser (writer, and British Government Official in Ireland, AD 1596).
The renaissance began in Ireland seven hundred years before it was known in Italy. And Armagh, the ecclesiastical capital of Ireland, was at one time the metropolis of civilisation.
- Arsene Darmesteter, Professor of Old French and Literature
Ireland can indeed lay claim to a great past; she can not only boast of having been the birthplace and abode of high culture in the fifth and sixth centuries . . . but also of having made strenous efforts in the seventh and up to the tenth century to spread her learning among the German and Romance peoples, thus forming the actual fountain of our present continental civilisation.
- Heinrich Zimmer, Professor of Celtic and Sanskrit, Member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences
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