He knows no word with which to describe war as he saw it. Hell is far too weak a word. “It is more horrible than the slaughter house, because the forms of death planned are more cruel, more mad, more devilish. We fight underground and under sea. We fight with fire, with steel, with lead, with poison, with burning oil, with gases. We are lower than the brutes, lower than the most degraded forms of life.... I am only Roméo Houle, a barber. But I have lived—God! I have lived. All the slaughter of heroes by the Meuse and on the Belgian border and in Northern France has passed before my eyes. And I, Roméo Houle, am forced to write this: ‘We cannot make ourselves better nor the world more worth while by killing each other like beasts gone mad.... I hope never to fight again.’” And here is a final reflection of the soldier who confesses “I do not know why we fought.” “No Archduke’s little life was worth the titanic butchery of the world war. The beginning was petty and small. And I, looking back at horror, horror, horror, cannot forget the extraordinary friendships we made with the men in the enemy’s trenches. We were both only human beings, after all, Fritz and I. We had no wish to kill each other. We had much rather sit at the same table, with our wives and children around us, and talk of gardens, of fair pictures, and of great books. But for our officers and the nations which they represented peace would have been declared right there in the trenches—and that by the soldiers themselves.” O’LEARY STEPPED IN And Faith, Never a Dumas Hero was a Marker to This Sergeant of the Irish Guards He got the habit and trick of it early they say. He played outside the home cottage in Macroom, about forty miles from the city of Cork, charging imaginary foes, stick in hand, with so much vigor that the plump hens scuttled to cover. His mother at the door of the cottage demanded, “An’ what is it ye are doin’ now, Mike?” And the curly-haired youngster replied: “I’m a sodger.” Twenty years later the same mother stood outside the same cottage door in Macroom listening to the almost unbelievable story of a messenger who had dashed from Cork city by motor-car. Her son—her Mike—had won the great war medal. She heard how the world was ringing with the immortal exploit of Sergeant Michael O’Leary, V.C. Poems were being written about him. He had received an ovation in London such as kings might envy. And all this was no more than the brave Irish Guardsman deserved, for with his unaided strong right arm he captured an enemy position, and of ten Germans who stood in his path he killed eight and took the remaining two prisoners.... O’Leary was sent to the front in November, 1914. Mr. Leask has told the story.