Bill Kerwin

Sally Horner can’t be cast aside so easily. She must be remembered as more than a young girl forever changed by a middle-aged man’s crime of monstrous perversion. A girl who survived adversity, manipulation, and cross-country horror, only to be denied a chance to grow up. A girl immortalized, and forever trapped in the pages of a classic novel of satire and sadness, like a butterfly with wings damaged before ever having the chance to fly.

There were three women in the ward who had all been struck by the same bullet: a mother, her daughter, and a cousin. They had been friendly to the British soldiers, had fed them because, as the mother told me, her husband and son were in the trenches fighting for Great Britain. These three women had been at their window, looking with curiosity into the street, when the very soldier they had just fed turned suddenly and shot them. One had her jawbone broken, the second her arm pierced, and the third was struck in the breast. They were all serious wounds which kept them in bed. While I was still in the ward, the two men of this family came back from Flanders on leave, only to find no one at home. The neighbors directed them to the hospital. I hate to think how those men looked when they learned why their women wore bandages. They told me that during Easter Week the Germans put up opposite the trenches of the Irish Brigade a placard that read:

"The military are shooting down your wives and children in Dublin."

But the Irish soldiers had not believed it ...

When the day came for them to return to the front, the father wanted to desert, dangerous as that would be, while the son was eager to go back to the trenches.

"This time," he said to me, "we'll not be killing Germans!"

When rumors came later of a mutiny in the Irish regiment, I wondered to myself if these two men were at the bottom of it.