Extracts from Addresses 347
the young men who have given up their lives, who have given up their
summer and their autumn and their winter in the days of spring for our
sakes; a danger that we may forget the sufferings that were endured
upon the battlefield and the danger that we may forget the sufferings
that the bereft relatives have endured and will endure for long, long
days to come. There is that danger, because, after all, the newspapers
tell us very little about such losses and sacrifices and sufferings. I will
just tell you what befell one of our Trinity boys, though it is a common-
place story. He was a lad of great promise, scientific promise. He had
published several valuable scientific papers, working in my own depart-
ment; in fact, he occupied the position of one of my assistants. He was
about twenty-five years of age at the time the war broke out, and he
told me that he had to go, that England—he did not put it that way;
he said, “They want men of my age,” and so he went. After some
months’ training he went out to the front, and he there invented a val-
uable range-finder for the use of machine guns, and the War Office took
it up and they transferred him into the Machine Gun Corps, and recom-
mended promotion from a second lieutenant to lieutenant. One day he
was out with two orderlies at the front, and they were ambushed by
German gunfire. There was a slight depression in the ground, affording
a little shelter, and there was room for two, but not for three, and he
put his two men into the little hole in the ground, and he himself wan-
dered off, looking for some kind of cover. He was shot by a bullet
that passed right through both thighs, and he fell. Night was coming
on and finding himself bleeding to death, he took out his handkerchief
and he made a tourniquet out of it and staunched the bleeding of the
artery, but there he lay throughout the night. When darkness came the
two orderlies, of course, sought to get away under cover of darkness.
They could not find him, and they thought he had gone back. He was
there for seven or eight hours before he was found. He was brought
down to Rouen and they telegraphed to his father, who is an old friend
of mine in Dublin. The father arrived to find they had amputated one
of the legs and the boy was dying. And so he died. He was engaged
to be married at the time that he went into active service. Now, the
whole of that pitiful tragedy—and I need not say anything to paint it
or make it more than it is—the whole of that pitiful tragedy appeared
in a single line in the newspaper, the name of the boy, Arnold Lockhart
Fletcher, Lieutenant M.G.C., and above it: “Died of wounds.” The
whole of that tragedy went into one line of the newspaper.
Think of how many lines there were in every day’s paper, names of
young lieutenants who had fallen in battle, and multiply that by the
number of papers that appeared in four years, and you have some idea