“Lieutenant Fallon, we deeply thank you for your services and I hope you live many years to wear the decoration I have placed upon you.” With that I stepped back the directed two paces, bowed and left by the right door, returned to the salon, received my hat and stick and stepped out to the entrance where the motor car, that had been parked on the grounds, was summoned and I started back to the home of my friends. My young lady companions had graciously awaited me in the car. Yet I rode back not altogether happily. I had come through with my life, I was maimed but by no means crippled for future usefulness, my nerves and mind were unimpaired, I had the King’s decoration on my coat, but for all that I felt an actual keen pang of lonesomeness. I was out of it--out of the big fight. CHAPTER XXI THE GRAY MOTHER I will close this book with words far nobler and more graceful than any I could pen which speak for the spirit which has brought to England, from East and South and North and West the hundreds of thousands, the millions who have taken up arms for her in this great trial of her future life, her prestige and her honor and for the humanity, democracy and civilization which history grants she has always championed. I got it from an Anzac private crippled for life, as he lay on a hospital cot in London, and he told me he had it from his father, a veteran of the Boer War, who had treasured it from that time. It was a clipping from the London Spectator, deeply yellowed in the passing of nearly a score of years. And it reads: THE GRAY MOTHER (To an Old Gaelic Air) From the Spectator Lo, how they come to me, Long through the night I call them, Ah, how they turn to me. East and South my children scatter, North and West the world they wander. Yet they come back to me, Come with their brave hearts beating, Longing to die for me, Me, the gray, old, weary mother, Throned amid the Northern waters, Where they have died for me, Died with their songs around me, Girding my shores for me. Narrow was my dwelling for them, Homes they builded o’er the ocean, Yet they leave all for me, Hearing their mother calling, Bringing their lives for me. Far from South seas swiftly sailing, Out from under stars I know not, Come they to fight for me, Sons of the sons I nurtured, God keep them safe for me. Long ago their fathers saved me, Died for me among the heather. Now they come back to me, Come, in their children’s children Brave of the brave for me. In the wilds and waves they slumber, Deep they slumber in the deserts, Rise they from graves to me, Graves where they lay forgotten, Shades of the brave for me. Yet my soul is veiled in sadness, For I see them fall and perish, Strewing the hills for me, Claiming the world in dying, Bought with their blood for me.