In the middle of December the cadet-battalions were wound up and the officers, after a few days’ leave, were sent back to their units. The Third Battalion of the Royal Welch was now at Limerick. I decided to overstay my leave until Nancy’s baby was born. She was expecting it early in January 1919, and her father had taken a house at Hove for the occasion. Jenny was born on Twelfth Night. She was neither coal-black nor affected by the shocks of the previous months. Nancy had had no foreknowledge of the experience—I assumed that she knew—and it took her years to recover from it. I went over to Limerick; the battalion was at the Castle Barracks. I lied my way out of the over-staying of leave. Limerick was a Sinn Fein stronghold, and there were constant clashes between the troops and the young men of the town, yet little ill-feeling; Welsh and Irish got on well together, as inevitably as Welsh and Scottish disagreed. The Royal Welch had the situation well in hand; they made a joke of politics and used their entrenching-tool handles as shillelaghs. It looked like a town that had been through the war. The main streets had holes in them like shell-craters and many of the bigger houses seemed on the point of collapse. I was told by an old man at an antique shop that no new houses were now built in Limerick, that when one house fell down the survivors moved into another. He said too that everyone died of drink in Limerick except the Plymouth Brethren, who died of religious melancholia. Life did not start in the city before about a quarter past nine in the morning. At nearly nine o’clock once I walked down O’Connell Street and found it deserted. When the hour chimed, the door of a magnificent Georgian house was flung open and out came, first a shower of slops, which just missed me, then a dog, which lifted up its leg against a lamp-post, then a nearly naked child, which sat down in the gutter and rummaged in a heap of refuse for dirty pieces of bread; finally a donkey, which began to bray. Ireland was exactly as I had pictured it. I felt its charm as dangerous. Yet when I was detailed to take out a search-party in a neighbouring village for concealed rifles I asked the adjutant to find a substitute; I said that I was an Irishman and did not wish to be mixed up in Irish politics. I realized too that I had a new loyalty, to Nancy and the baby, tending to overshadow regimental loyalty now that the war was over. Once I was writing a rhymed nonsense letter to Nancy and Jenny in my quarters overlooking the barrack square: Is there any song sweet enough For Nancy or for Jenny? Said Simple Simon to the Pieman: ‘Indeed, I know not any.’ I have counted the miles to Babylon, I have flown the earth like a bird, I have ridden cock-horse to Banbury Cross, But no such song have I heard.