Brother Jack begat two sons by a strapping Irish lass named Mary Dolores Partry—he must have told you. She died. The boys have been raised by the kin of their late mum. I have made efforts to know them and to tender such support as I might—for example, by recruiting a few of their uncles and cousins into our Regiment. My life as a soldier has made me a poor uncle indeed. But the boys, who have inherited their dad’s weakness to impulses of a perverse kind, and who have been raised by Irishmen to boot, seem to respect me all the more, the more I neglect them.