“No one would expect an oath like that to bind you to fight against your own people,” said Larry quickly.
“In Kentucky, boy,” said Kentucky gently, his speech running, as it always did when he was stirred into the slurred, soft “r”-less drawl of his own South, “an oath is an oath, and a promise is little sho’t of it. I fought foh yoh country because I thought yoh country was right. But I come at last to fight foh her, because I’ve got to be proud of her and of belonging to her. And I want to pay the best bit of respect I can think of to those men I fought along with. It just pleases me some to think poor old Pug and Billy and a right smart mo’ we knew would like it--I’m going to take out naturalization papers just as soon as I can do it.”
“Like it,” said Larry, with his eyes glistening; “why, yes, I think they’d like it.”
Kentucky hesitated a little, then went on slowly: “And theh’s some verses I know that have so’t of come to map out a route fo’ me to follow. Oveh theh those verses stood right up an’ spoke to me. I’ve thought it oveh quite a lot since, an’ it’s sure plain to me that I was made to see how close they fitted to what I could see, an’ heah, an’ undehstand, just so I could use the otheh verses to show me otheh things I could not undehstand. I’d like to tell yo’ some of those verses an’ how they come in.”
He told first the picture he had seen of the German prisoners searching amongst their own heaped dead, while the British guard stood watching them, and the sky flickered with “the fateful lightning” and the guns growled their triumph song; and then went on and repeated the verse of the Battle Hymn, “Mine eyes have seen----”
“You see just how exact it fitted,” he said. “But it wasn’t only in that. Theh were otheh lines”; and he went on to tell of the journey back from the advanced dressing station, the camp fires dotting the hills, the mists crawling in the valley, the lanterns moving to and fro where the bearers still searched for the wounded. “Just see how it came in again,” he said, and repeated another verse:
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps, They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps, I have read His righteous sentence in the dim and flaring lamps, His truth is marching on.