Kelly is a strict disciplinarian, at least so far as others are concerned. While he takes liberties in passing his own opinions to me, he resents any other private doing likewise. In his presence one day at a sick parade a soldier who had been marked by me, M & D--medicine and duty, that is, given medicine but fit for duty--muttered something to the effect that one never gets a fair deal from a military doctor anyway. Before I could reprimand him Kelly hustled him out of the room, saying angrily: "Begobs, ye may have been exposed to discipline, but it niver took." In his insistence on everyone else's carrying out all the laws of military discipline, while breaking most of them himself, he is the equal of almost any officer. On a delightful spring day after the Battle of Arras, our battalion was holding the front line out beyond Thelus. My aid post was on a sunken road near Willerval, one of the many sunken roads which are talked about by anyone who has ever been at the front. The wounded had to be brought to us by stretcher bearers at night, as the whole front here was a huge salient with the Huns pumping lead forget-me-nots from three sides by day on the least exposure of our men. So our work was all night work, and I lay lazily on a stretcher in an abandoned German gunpit, taking a sun bath. There originally had been a roof over this gunpit. It was made up of one-inch boards laid carelessly across steel supports, and in the remains of this roof two little swallows were gaily chirping, love-making, and nest-building for their family-to-be, ignoring entirely man's inhumanity to man. Kelly was sitting on his haunches, his gray head held on one side, thoughtfully watching these happy little birds. "Well, Kelly," I demanded, "of what are you dreaming?" "I was jest thinkin', docthor," he answered, without turning his head, "what a puny sinse of humor man has in comparison with thim swallows yonder." "Have swallows a sense of humor, Kelly?" "Have they a sinse of humor? Whoy, they're laughin' at ye this very minute"; I turned my head a trifle sharply in his direction; "an' at me, an' the rist of humanity. Listen to thim laugh. An' whoy shouldn't they laugh, whin they think what a gay world they live in, with room fer all of thim an' all of us; an' yet whoile they live, an' love, an' have their young, an' doie in peace, we min, wid the brains of gods, so we say, spind our toime invintin' new manes of killin' aich other? An' fer whoy? For a few acres of bog land, fer the privilege of christianizin' an' chatin' the haithin by givin' him some glass beads in exchange fer his iv'ry, an' his indy rubber, an' his spoices. Take a look yander at that skoylark. Wouldn't he do yer heart good?" And he pointed to where one of those joy-giving birds was soaring "higher still and higher," and lavishly pouring out upon an ungrateful world his flood of harmony divine. "What about liberty as opposed to this cursed German militarism?"