In the end Patsey made up his mind that the only thing to do was to go to England in search of work, and one cold winter’s morning he set off from his home, in company with three other lads from the same townland, to walk the fifteen miles across the mountains and bogs to the nearest railway station at Ballybor. Arriving in England, they made their way to a town in Yorkshire, where one of them had a brother working in a coal-mine, and within three days of leaving his home in Ireland Patsey found himself a Yorkshire miner. Hardly had he settled down to his work in the coal-mine when the war broke out, followed by a rush of young miners to enlist, amongst others Patsey Mulligan; and before he realised what he was doing, he was a full private in a famous Yorkshire regiment. Patsey had, however, enlisted in the name of Murphy, hoping to keep his people in ignorance of the fact, knowing it would break his mother’s heart if she knew he was fighting. Patsey thoroughly enjoyed the training, and within seven months of enlisting embarked for France; and after a few weeks’ pleasant life in billets, gradually moved north until finally the battalion took over trenches in the famous salient of Ypres—a great contrast to Patsey’s home in the west of Ireland. There happened to be in the battalion a young Irish subaltern by name Anthony Blake, and when Blake told his Company Sergeant-Major to find him a servant—an Irishman if possible—Patsey at once volunteered for the job, and between the two young Irishmen there soon sprang up a friendship through the common bond of danger and discomfort. After some time Patsey learnt through one of the boys with whom he had first crossed to England that his mother was dangerously ill, and that she had repeatedly written to Patsey to come home and see her before she died, but had naturally received no answer. In his trouble he appealed to Blake, and that night found him waiting at Popperinghe Station for the leave train with a return-warrant to Ballybor in his pocket. On his arrival at Ballybor he set out on his long fifteen-mile tramp to his home at Cloonalla, and late on a summer’s evening the family of Mulligan were startled by a British soldier in full marching order walking into their home. Before his mother died she made Patsey promise that he would not go back to France, and that he would stay at home and help his father to mind the other children. It is hard for a son to refuse his dying mother, and doubly so for an Irish boy. When his mother’s funeral was over, Patsey buried his uniform and equipment in a bog-hole at night; but his rifle he hid in the thatch of an outhouse, and it was given out in the neighbourhood that he had been discharged from the Army as medically unfit.