Our road came in for a spell of peace after the departure of the
Minister of Propaganda. From time to time other houses up and down
the way had been looked up by the Crown Forces; but for a while the
neighbourhood seemed to pass out of the public eye, and the lorries
rolled down other streets.
I had been out when the Auxiliaries made their call, and I returned to
find a gaping congregation at the mouth of our street, and outside our
house the glaring headlights of an armoured car, and two great shadowy
lorries, which were filling up again with men. As I reached the door,
a neighbour, on tiptoe with excitement, called from her top doorstep,
“They’ve raided your house again, and they’ve taken a man out of it.”
I had come as the curtain was falling. The engines of the lorries were
humming, and first one lorry moved off and then the next, and the
armoured car rolled on their heels. In a few moments the street, which
had been filled with noise, became quiet again, heads went in from
windows, and people retreated from doorsteps.
But our door remained open, and on the top step, in the hall light,
stood a little group of women: Mrs. Slaney, upright and defiant, Mrs.
Fitzgerald gazing wistfully into the dark, and my wife.
“What do you think of this?” Mrs. Slaney demanded, turning terribly
upon me as I came up the steps. “Any honest Englishman must blush for
what his Government does.”
While I was searching for a happy answer, Mrs. Fitzgerald said
something which gave me a peep into her mind.
“If it weren’t for the work,” she said, “it’s a good thing in some ways
that this has happened. There was always the chance he might be shot in
the street. He’s safer where he is. And he wanted a rest.”
“There you are, Mabel,” said a voice, and Miss Gavan Duffy, sister of
the Sinn Fein Ambassador to Rome, came up the steps.
“They’ve just taken him,” Mrs. Fitzgerald said.
“I heard,” Miss Gavan Duffy answered, making me wonder at the speed at
which news travelled among them.
Mrs. Fitzgerald had become all energy. “I shall have to go down and let
the newspapers know,” she said. “They’ll have it in to-morrow morning
like that. Once it’s in the papers the Castle people are less likely to
do anything to him.”
“I expect he’ll be all right, Mabel,” Miss Gavan Duffy suggested.
“There’s not much time for you before Curfew.”
“Are you expecting anything to happen to him?” I asked.
Mrs. Fitzgerald turned in my direction. “It will be all right if I let
the papers know he has been taken. The Castle people can’t deny things
then. It’s on the way to the Castle and during interrogation that our
people sometimes come in for a bad time. Once they are properly lodged
they are all right. Desmond will probably be interrogated to-night.
There is a captain”--I forget now what name she said--“who was wounded
in the war and seems to be a degenerate. He takes a delight in
torturing our people. Desmond may come before him to-night. It makes a
difference whom our boys go before when they are up for interrogation.”
Before the night was much older, I believe Mrs. Fitzgerald, true to her
word, was on her way down town to hand in her news at the newspaper
offices.
We saw very little of her at first after that evening. She lived
underneath us with a nurse and the infant son, Fergus. There were two
other boys at school.
There was no more tireless worker in the Republican cause. She worked
all day, and for a while after her husband went she worked all
night--keeping his propaganda work up to date, I suppose. Mrs. O’Grady,
kneeling on a piece of newspaper before our sitting-room fire of a
morning, would sniff and say, “That woman’s light is never out. That
woman’s writing there all night. She’ll kill herself if she doesn’t
mind. She’s that pale each morning she looks like a ghost. And what
now, if the Black-and-Tans come back again and find what she’s got
there?”
“Och, Mrs. O’Grady, indade and these do be terrible times,” I would
answer.
When Mrs. Fitzgerald was not at work below she was in the streets,
hurrying, no doubt on the business of the Republic, from house to
house. She never walked, she went always at a trot. She seemed always
behind time, always at the end of her tether; always ready for any new
work that might have to be done. If all she did in a day were well
done, she would have been one of the most useful members of the Cumann
na mBan.
Yet, as was the case with numerous other prominent women, the British
Government never took steps to put an end to her activities, though it
was common knowledge that as the men were taken, the work fell more and
more upon the shoulders of women.
For days after her husband’s arrest, Mrs. Fitzgerald kept very much to
herself, partly, no doubt, because of her press of work, partly because
her work was confidential; but also, I think, because she was sensitive
and loth to intrude.
In the beginning it was “Good morning,” if we passed in the hall or
in the street; then she came up one day to get the address of some
publishers for her husband’s plays, and so the acquaintance made
headway. One evening, on some errand or other, I penetrated for the
first time into her sitting-room.
She was reading at the table in the small circle of light cast by the
lamp, and she looked immensely lonely. It was as though there was
just the circle of light where she sat reading, and outside that the
dark--the dark room with high lights here and there on the bookcases,
the dark city in a greater circle outside, and encircling the city the
darkness one felt resting over the land, over the troubled world for
that matter. I do not know if she felt as I felt about this, she looked
as lonely as any creature I have seen.
I cannot recall whether we had said “good evening”--we had said no
more than that--when furiously, wildly on the silence, a volley of
shots burst out near Stephen’s Green, abruptly as light flashing out
of darkness. The shooting continued for several seconds, seconds which
any one unused to shooting would have reckoned as minutes, and then
wore out in the customary fashion, odd shots coming from a greater and
greater distance, as if a running fight was moving away from us.
Mrs. Fitzgerald threw up her head, not in fear, hardly with a startled
movement; but as though hearing the battle afar off, the thunders of
the captains and the shouting. I forget what we said at the end of
the shooting, remarks were fatuous in the circumstances; but in those
moments I had seen more clearly than ever before the stupendous waste
of energy caused by man not having learned to work in harmony with man.
If ever there had been an attempt to reach the truth of the Irish
story, that effort had long ago been expended. Nobody wanted the truth
now, neither Loyalist nor Republican, and it was difficult to remain in
Ireland and be a bystander. It was necessary to take up the cudgels for
one side or the other, and to lie for the side you chose.
That honest men were to be found holding to either opinion, and that
rogues were to be found holding to either opinion was as absolutely
a fact as that there had just been firing going on; but neither man,
woman, nor child desired such an unpalatable truth. It suited the
Republicans to label all members of the Crown Forces as jailbirds and
assassins, to state this for propaganda purposes at the tops of their
voices, to bludgeon themselves into believing it to be the case.
It suited the Loyalists to call the Irish Volunteers a murder gang,
though the long resistance of the Republican army, and the numbers
enlisted in the ranks had long confounded this statement. It suited
Loyalists to hypnotise themselves into this belief, otherwise they
might have stopped short with their mouths open in the middle of a
shout, and demanded of one another was there not some justice in the
Republican cause.
Faugh! a man grows cynical if he contemplates too long this state of
things, and asks himself what is any controversy other than a handful
of thinking men leading a mob against a second handful of thinking men
leading a mob, and the mob some blundering animal which can be made
wild or tame as it is stroked or beaten. Never is it fed with the truth.
Yet fundamentally all men are the same.
Those Black-and-Tans, those Auxiliary Police who had been shopping in
Grafton Street at Christmas, went shopping in armoured lorries, and
when the lorry stopped at the shop door, and the shoppers went inside,
guards with rifles were posted in the street. Such trouble and risks
did these people take that their wives, their children, and their
friends should be remembered at this time.
And no doubt the Republican Volunteers, such of them as were lying out
on the bleak hillsides, such of them as frequently had to retreat into
caves, turned in thought at Christmas to such gentle things as mothers,
lovers, wives, and children and their toys. A few months after this
struggle was done, the “murder gang” and “Hamar Greenwood’s assassins”
would be living as friends again.
Waste! Waste!
Looking at this woman who sat here so lonely, who once must have been
pretty and still was good-looking, with the light from the lamp falling
upon her fair hair, which was neither gold nor brown nor red nor
auburn, but a blend of those colours, I felt the pity of the fact that
she was using her energies against the British nation instead of with
it.
She had chosen the thorny instead of the smooth path of life, for I
understand she had been reared in easy circumstances; she had borne
three children during her difficulties, she had witnessed raid and
arrest, she had had her furniture and clothes destroyed, and she had
had to do battle for herself and her children while her husband was
in prison. She was tireless in helping on the Republic, which was
her creed, and she never complained. She was only one of others like
herself.
All day long and all night long the lorries and the armoured cars
rolled up and down the streets, and the patrols of armed men tramped
round the corners--Loyalist energy to meet this Republican energy. What
waste that the two energies should be employed against each other!
Or is it that the gods have longer vision than mortal men, and afflict
man with an idea that, like rain upon a plant, difficulty shall water
his spirit, and it shall sprout and flourish? Is it that men live and
live again, the spirit working in matter and mastering it life by life?
If this be so there seems a plan in confusion, use in wasted effort,
hope in hopelessness.
The acquaintance with Mrs. Fitzgerald grew, though circumstance set
limits upon it. Her work kept her to herself. All sorts of people
used to call, and I do not doubt some of them were of interest to
the British authorities. Once she must have held a meeting of some
importance, because a picket, who seemed to have cross eyes, stood
outside the house and glared at me when I came home, and I thought he
was there to assassinate me.
But though we never shared the secrets of her work, the acquaintance
grew, and she gave us peeps into her life.
She was an out-and-out Republican, and contemplated nothing short of
the Republic. I was sure she was doomed to disappointment, and hinted
this once. She answered:
“If we do not get a Republic at the end of this, there will always be a
Republican party, and I shall belong to it. We will never give up the
Republic.” A minute later she said an illuminating thing. “We are not
in sympathy with England. We would sooner make an alliance with some
country like France.”
Although she held extreme views and had suffered for them, I found her
far less bitter in her statements about the enemy than the sympathisers
who gave sympathy as a sole contribution to the movement. She spoke of
the Crown Forces in a professional manner as part of the obstacles to
be got out of the way. She would have shown them no mercy; but she bore
them no more rancour than was necessary. She was used to dealing with
them, knew all the tricks of the trade, and made use of her advantages.
This same Mrs. Fitzgerald, I came to find out, mother of three
children, woman of so many duties that she went at a jog-trot in the
streets, this Mrs. Fitzgerald was a most romantic person. Her first
hero had been Padraig Pierce, a leader of the 1916 Rising, and she had
called one of her boys after him. The man to fill his place was Michael
Collins, Mick as she called him, the Republican Minister of Finance,
who used to be spoken of as “a certain minister,” the phrase whispered
from person to person, as if his name spoken aloud would blast the lips
that uttered it.
She spoke quite simply of being battered from pillar to post, of having
her household gods damaged, of doing without them, of the frequent
difficulty of getting a roof over her head, yet I believe she thought
wistfully now and then of the fleshpots she had given up for the
Republic. She reminded me of those women who have been drudges for
the sake of their children, and who point fiercely at what they have
produced when some scented, jewelled creature passes by.
I have spoken of her at length, because she represented a type of Irish
woman whose sincerity and generosity could not be denied.
Seldom a day went by without sound of explosion near or far, seldom a
night went through without shooting, it might be an intermittent shot
or two or a sudden volley breaking out wildly on the quiet, followed
by desultory shooting, growing fainter as the exchange of shots passed
down distant streets.
It was too early yet for the weather to be charitable, for days to
lengthen appreciably or nights to shorten; but one had the fancy
that the sun was on the way back from happier lands, and when it
returned peace might come with it, that honourable peace without which
neither side would stay a hand, that honourable peace which seemed so
impossible to conceive and to bring about.
It was a case of wish being father to the thought, for matters were
continuing to go from bad to worse. The Republican Volunteers appeared
to be adopting a bolder policy, and some of the skirmishes which took
place deserved the name. From the private citizen’s point of view,
the situation had become a great deal worse. Volunteers had taken to
ambushing the military lorries in the streets, and this method of
campaign was the last drop in the cup of woe of the peace-loving person.
The arguments the Republicans put forward for this step were
sufficiently sound in their way. They declared the enemy used the
streets on their work of raid and arrest, and obtained special
protection. Where the Republican policy was most open to criticism was
in the fact that the Volunteers made flagrant use of the protection
afforded by the crowd.
The Volunteers could have operated in deserted places, the outlying
streets and so on; but such a course increased personal risks. There
was greater likelihood of discovery from loitering, there was more
chance of coming under the return fire from police lorries, and the
neighbouring getaways would not be good. When a busy street was decided
on, it was chosen for its escapes, for the opportunities afforded
the ambushers of mingling with the crowd until the chosen moment, and
thirdly, because, after the attack, the Volunteers could become the
crowd again, and the ambushed troops would not know where to shoot.
In nine cases out of ten it was the inoffensive citizen who paid the
penalty of other people’s political views. In the exchange of fire
some harassed bystander was generally brought to the ground. Finally,
public nerves were so stretched that sudden explosions brought about
stampedes, and it is on record that the backfire of a motorcycle caused
women near at hand to faint.
The climax was the Grafton Street ambush, when sixteen passers were
wounded by bomb splinters. There were no casualties among the police,
and the ambushers got away unscathed.
It is possible in the beginning there were more casualties among the
Crown Forces than were acknowledged; but casualties on either side were
few. On the heels of the weapon of offence follows always the defensive
weapon. It was not long before stout wire netting, sloped at such an
angle that bombs aimed at the lorries rolled off on to the ground, was
stretched over the tops of the lorries. “Chook, chook, chook!” cried
the rebel children as the police flew by, and the following mot went
the rounds of Dublin, “The Boers put them in khaki, the Germans put the
tin hats on them; but it took the Sinn Feiners to put them into cages.”
“Four years, five years,” Mrs. Erskine Childers said to me one day,
“our people can carry on like this, and by that time England will have
experienced a social upheaval and Ireland will have come into her own.”
In truth, the Irish people would never be overcome by this glorified
police hunt. Though the leaders might be netted one by one, others
would spring up like wheat in their places. Where one man went down
another would rise up. Old women of seventy carried the guns to the
Volunteers in the fields. Children as high as one’s hip acted as spies
and messengers. The nation was in travail, but the nation was exalted.
The military force which the British Government saw fit to use could
only bleed, it could not kill.