With the arrival of June a long dry summer made a beginning. The leaves
were thick upon the trees, the birds had done their spring singing and
were sending their families out into the world, and the nursemaids and
children had all come back again to Stephen’s Green. The babies that
had filled the perambulators of last year toddled beside the wheels
this year, and new babies were lying upon the old cushions.
But political affairs showed no alteration, and though it was fixed in
everybody’s mind that the British Government was about to make a change
in policy, an overture of peace or a fiercer war, there was no sign of
this, and affairs were more acute. But these days could not desolate
a man as the winter days had done, for now there was sunshine and now
there was light.
One morning, as I wandered in the direction of Stephen’s Green I saw
Mrs. Desmond Fitzgerald. She must have come in from her cottage in the
hills. I wanted to ask her something; but she was moving at her own
special pace, which resembled nothing so much as the tireless trot of
a wolf, and perceiving I would have to hire a side-car to overtake her,
and being without funds, I went into the Green and fell upon a seat
in a muse. The nursemaids, the children and the cereopsis goose from
Australia drifted out of my vision.
I revived to see walking by me ten Republican Volunteers or ten of
the murder gang, according to what were one’s political opinions.
These people wore trench coats, the pockets of which were swollen with
guns and bombs, and they looked very self-conscious. They had come up
Grafton Street and in by the main gate there, and they were crossing
the Green in couples to the farther end. They must be going to blow up
somebody, I thought, and fell into a muse again upon them.
Of course these people were only corner-boys. They were corner-boys in
the strictest sense of the word. They were on the way to a corner where
they would throw those bombs and let off those guns, and then they
would depart home as hurriedly and as safely as they could. They were
corner-boys. And yet they were something more than corner-boys. The
type of warfare they conducted brought them few casualties; but one had
only to see those self-conscious anxious faces to know it was not the
joy of murder that impelled them on the way. These people, who had just
walked by, were going to render a certain service at a street corner
because they believed their country needed that service. Why deny them
any lustre that was theirs?
I fell out of my muse about ten minutes later when I heard the roar
of a couple of bombs and some rifle fire. Bullets clipped the leaves
overhead, and I felt ruffled. They must have blown somebody up, I
thought, and fell into a second muse.
As a matter of fact they had nearly blown my wife up, and also several
women with perambulators; but the only person who got shot was an
old beggar woman sitting on the steps of St. Vincent’s Hospital. My
wife said when the bombs were thrown and the Auxiliaries were firing
back, the Volunteers seized the perambulators and hustled them and the
frantic nurses into the shelter of Stephen’s Green. Whether this act
was to protect the children, or whether it was to take suspicion off
the Volunteers, she could not make up her mind. Let us give judgment
for the first.
I awakened from my second muse to find a gun being flourished at my
stomach, and a fiery Auxiliary, an ex-officer and a loyal gentleman or
one of Hamar Greenwood’s hired assassins, according to a man’s views,
ordering me to “go over there and be searched.” I looked “over there,”
and saw all the men in the Green bunched together and the Auxiliaries
searching them. I started to go over, and the Auxiliary flew after
another solitary individual. There were half a dozen bushes on the way
I could have dropped guns behind.
In a minute or two I had joined the bunch of men. I began to feel in a
hurry all of a sudden, for it was getting towards lunch-time, and when
a queue was formed, I took an opportunity to get into the front of it.
It was after I was well in position that I remembered my pocket-book
had entries in it, names of Sinn Feiners and titles of pamphlets, which
might cause these gentlemen in Balmoral bonnets to prick up their ears.
They might feel it on their conscience to haul me off to the Castle
to explain myself, and it was easier to enter the Castle Yard than to
leave the Castle Yard. I became humble. I withdrew, I evaporated, I
murmured after you, sir, and I went crabwise to the last place in the
line. It took me twenty minutes and a good deal of bother to pull the
necessary leaves from my pocket-book without being noticed, tear them
into little bits, and sprinkle them in the grass.
When my turn came the Auxiliary said without touching me, “You’ll do.”
“Search me,” I demanded.
He smiled, patted my pockets, and said, “You’ll do.”
They knew the sort of man to look for.
But, of course, anybody who knew the ropes realised the searching
of this line of men had been pathetic, for over on the seats sat
nursemaids and little typists, and other high-heeled and short-skirted
people. If any of the ambushers had had the misfortune to be shut in
the gardens, their guns were not on them. They would be in some bush,
or they would be in the dress of one of those demure maidens.
It was nothing strange to be stopped by the military in the street and
searched for arms, and the custom was growing to let women carry the
guns until they were wanted and receive them again afterwards, for
women were not allowed to be searched except in emergency by women
searchers. The British Government was paternal in some things to the
end, and earned the righteous scorn of Loyalist and Republican alike.
About this time we paid visits to Mrs. Erskine Childers. Her house
was one of the rocks of Republicanism. One met there the more extreme
Cumann na mBan, and as the Cumann na mBan consisted of women they were
nearly all extreme. It was whispered that all sorts of people on the
run visited the place; but the ordinary visitor to the house never met
these people. It was necessary for Mrs. Childers to lead an inactive
life, and her energies had gone into her intellect. She sat all day
in her library dipping into her books, and she had become very well
educated politically.
The rule that the convert makes the fiercest apostle held good in
the case of these two--of Mrs. Childers, an American citizen, and of
Childers, the Englishman, who in earlier years had served Britain and
the British Empire in the army and the navy. The nationality of Mrs.
Childers, and the fact that she was a person of breeding in a movement
where most of the followers belonged to the people, made her valuable,
and all wandering strangers whose sympathy it was desirable to enlist,
were taken along to her with the words, “Oh, you must see Mrs. Erskine
Childers. She can tell you so much.” Mrs. Childers, refined, daintily
dressed, intellectual, lying on her couch, put them right upon the
wrongs of Ireland.
The strangest of the birds of passage that passed through Ireland
during these troubled times were Americans, who, one and all, belied
their national reputation for shrewdness. Those I came across in
Ireland were emotional, simple individuals, ready to credit any
well-told story.
What of Childers himself, the toiling Childers, the small harassed man,
for ever pedalling his bicycle; Childers who, of all those hard-working
people, outworked all others; Childers who looked as though he might
die and still sit upon his bicycle with his legs going round and round?
This toiling Republican, whom the British Government in the strangeness
of its ways left free, was he a man with a broken heart, and this very
fever of work the effort to escape his sorrow? Was there truth in the
whisper that he was a disappointed English naval man, who in pique had
thrown himself into Irish affairs? Then, indeed, he was a small man,
and all his furious pedalling would never bring him balm. But if his
work for Ireland represented truth to him, so that no doubt ever came
to make him irresolute, so that he never thought hungrily of his own
country which he had forsaken then, indeed, he was bigger than the
common run of man, and his toil may have brought repose to his spirit.
Mrs. Desmond Fitzgerald had a cottage in the hills, not very far from
the city. We made occasional pilgrimages there. The two-mile walk from
the station was nothing on those first kind summer days. There were
pools of shade for the traveller to wade through under the trees; the
lower lands were golden with gorse; the sky was high and serene. Yet
the country bore more marks of ruin than the city.
An occasional gaunt building, such as the skeleton of the Customs
House or the General Post Office, was all the wear and tear the city
showed, though observant people could find bullet holes in a good many
windows, some of them small and clean as if an augur had bored them,
others brutally done, so that the cracks had run all about the pane.
Sometimes a great plate-glass window would be annihilated, sometimes
the fragments of some bomb leaping from the pavement would tear a score
of holes in a door and stay embedded there; but next day the glazier
would be along with his putty and the decorator with his paint brush,
and there would be nothing to see.
It was different in the country. One came upon trees felled across
the road, or lying prone, leaving just enough space for the cart of
the marketing peasant. One came upon walls tumbled to the ground, and
a pyramid of broken masonry lying in wait for the hurrying police
tender. Round abrupt corners one stepped into trenches dug across the
road to receive the front wheels of some military lorry shaking upon
its way.
Military and police presently took with them little bridges to engineer
the lorries across the trenches, and so with a bare halt went throbbing
on their way; but the graves set in the road for leviathan fare stayed
there unattended, yawning for the poor peasant and his cart. Nobody
filled these gaps, perhaps from patriotism, perhaps because such
busybody act might call down the vengeance of the Republican Army
hanging somewhere in the hills, or equally probably because the tired
peasant, having negotiated the yawn with his own wit, left other people
to be as wise as he, and went on home, looking neither right nor left,
in case he saw more than was wise.
But summer had come quite indifferent to these things; and by wood and
hedge and stream it had arrived a-blooming; it had gone rolling up and
down the hills, and into the shining sky.
Those who knew the way about the slopes of these hills could spy
outposts of the Republican Army, men moving about the hills with
telescopes, sometimes the flutter of a signalling flag. What a draught
for bold youth this mountain air! The veriest bent-backed clerk, taken
out here from his city office, would begin to straighten and stamp in
the high romantic manner; how then some fiery country boy led to these
high places and told Ireland’s fatal story? High up there, each man
his individual eagle, staring down with unfilmed eye upon the faint
white roads netting the fair country, they could mark the hurrying
police tenders and exult at their freedom.
These hills held caves where men retreated in extremity after the
police had raided the farmhouses that usually gave them shelter.
On a shoulder of the outside range of these hills--high enough for the
sea to be seen, so near to Dublin that the city seemed to be lying a
few miles away in a smoky pool--Mrs. Desmond Fitzgerald had a cottage
and a garden plot. She dug in the garden while there was excuse for
digging, and it was there she seemed to soften for a few moments, and
let some of this Republican load, which she had taken upon herself to
carry, fall off her back.
To the peasants of that hamlet, which went climbing up the pass for
a mile, she must have been some one come from the bigger world, a
sojourner with people whose names were in the papers, on whose heads
was a price, to stimulate the cottagers and hold them to their purpose,
to refill the cup of village louts drunk with the grandeur of the times.
The fact that the Republicans were a small man fighting a giant was
worth a second army to them, for however just the big man’s cause, his
efforts against a smaller man are thankless, and the world, which never
goes to the roots of a matter, has no sympathy to give him.
On the British Army and the Police fell none of the glory the gods were
raining down. They carried out their orders under the most adverse
conditions, and got the knocks and fatigues without the applause. They
must have had to prop their energies now and then with the remembrance
that though the nation whose servants they were had little interest in
their doings, dismissed them with the morning bacon and the propped-up
newspaper, their thankless task had as great use as any which trumpets
heralded and all the world streamed out to cheer.
One day I ran across 47, in Phœnix Park of all places. Some tender
moment had brought him to walk among the flowers there. It was one of
the few times I saw him before he saw me. He seemed to be communing
with himself, like a monk pacing a cloisteral retreat. I supposed he
was wondering how long his lonely vigil was still to last.
I crossed the green behind him and said, “Hallo. I see you have the
pip.”
“I’ve not got the pip. I’ve had enough of Ireland, though.”
“It’s a tip-top day.”
He pondered this, and then said something that surprised me. It showed
which way his thoughts were running.
“The heart of a giant must beat under an agent’s coat. He goes alone
about his work. He goes unpraised about his work. He has no armed men
at his back. To-day, alone. To-morrow, alone. Every man an oyster he
must open. Ha, ha! he cries, and joins once again in the laugh against
what he loves. He waits, he waits. He watches, he watches. That is the
order of his day. Let him open his eyes a little wider, let him prick
his ears a little sharper; some hurt may be coming to the country he
serves. He grows tired in the end.
“But he must not grow tired. Here and here and here he steps lightly,
surely, certainly. And how does he open each golden gate? His key? He
concentrates on what he takes in hand to the exclusion of everything
else.”
We had fallen into line and were stalking over the lawn. 47 began again
after a few steps.
“Our mutual acquaintance has a story that on a Continental stunt it was
necessary he should become a waiter, therefore he chose a waiter in
his hotel, and sat down for six weeks and watched him. He looked at no
other waiter. He looked at nothing else. He learned how a waiter waited
for a tip, how he coughed on the plates, how he picked his teeth with
the forks. That mutual acquaintance of ours knew the way to go about
things.”
“Are you people any nearer clearing things up?” I asked. “By gad, you
all seem to work hard enough for your living. The Auxiliaries and
the Black-and-Tans are going day and night.” He made no answer, and
I added, “I may as well tell you the Sinn Feiners can go on for ever
at the present rate of things. You might have netted them all in the
beginning; there are too many of them now. You’ve pricked and pricked
and pricked them until you’ve pricked the whole nation alive. Why do
you people delude yourselves by making statements every few weeks that
the Irish situation is well in hand? It’s pathetic to listen to you,
and the awakening must come sooner or later.”
“It’s beginning already in a few places,” 47 answered. “You’ll find
there’s a change of policy before long. The police chase will turn
into something that can be dignified by the name of war, or there will
be an offer made and negotiations will begin. You’ll find it will be
negotiations. Whether war or negotiations the issue will be the same.
Ireland will obtain a full measure of self-government.” He stalked on
a step or two and said, “For the old order is changing and the British
Empire, whether it likes it or not, is going to change from a number
of nations dominated by a central power to equal nations linked by a
common history.”
“It’s time you got a move on,” I retorted. “India and Egypt are
starting to go along the same road as Ireland. There are the same
symptoms to recognise the disease by. Kidnappings, assassinations, and
plenty of intimidation on both sides. Why not give India and Egypt what
they are going to get gracefully instead of having them threaten it out
of you?”
47 shrugged his shoulders and suffered from one of his bursts of
philosophy. “Perhaps it is written the history of man is to be one of
confusion and pain from beginning to end. So does the spirit master
matter and gather its experience.”
After that we wandered round among the flowers, which were a new lot
and as good as usual; then we took our separate ways home.
“It’s a longer au revoir than usual,” I said, flourishing a hand.
“How’s that?”
“I’m off to Ulster for the twelfth of July. I’m thinking of going quite
soon.”
“You may find a change when you come back. Peace or something of the
sort.”
“By all means.”
My road always lay through the centre of the city, and coming to
College Green one met the inevitable paper boys bawling their wares,
and if one still had curiosity enough to buy another issue, one opened
it to find “Auxiliaries capture a Number of Armed Civilians,” or
“Mysterious Death. Man’s Body found in Field. On the Victim’s Breast
was pinned a piece of paper bearing the words--‘Spies and Informers
beware. By Order. I.R.A.’”