WHEN there was a rumour of war with France a while ago, I met a poor
Sligo woman, a soldier’s widow, that I know, and I read her a sentence
out of a letter I had just had from London: ‘The people here are mad
for war, but France seems inclined to take things peacefully,’ or some
like sentence. Her mind ran a good deal on war, which she imagined
partly from what she had heard from soldiers, and partly from tradition
of the rebellion of ’98, but the word London doubled her interest, for
she knew there were a great many people in London, and she herself
had once lived in ‘a congested district.’ ‘There are too many over
one another in London. They are getting tired of the world. It is
killed they want to be. It will be no matter; but sure the French want
nothing but peace and quietness. The people here don’t mind the war
coming. They could not be worse than they are. They may as well die
soldierly before God. Sure they will get quarters in heaven.’ Then
she began to say that it would be a hard thing to see children tossed
about on bayonets, and I knew her mind was running on traditions of
the great rebellion. She said presently, ‘I never knew a man that was
in a battle that liked to speak of it after. They’d sooner be throwing
hay down from a hayrick.’ She told me how she and her neighbours used
to be sitting over the fire when she was a girl, talking of the war
that was coming, and now she was afraid it was coming again, for she
had dreamed that all the bay was ‘stranded and covered with seaweed.’
I asked her if it was in the Fenian times that she had been so much
afraid of war coming. But she cried out, ‘Never had I such fun and
pleasure as in the Fenian times. I was in a house where some of the
officers used to be staying, and in the daytime I would be walking
after the soldiers’ band, and at night I’d be going down to the end
of the garden watching a soldier, with his red coat on him, drilling
the Fenians in the field behind the house. One night the boys tied the
liver of an old horse, that had been dead three weeks, to the knocker,
and I found it when I opened the door in the morning.’ And presently
our talk of war shifted, as it had a way of doing, to the battle of the
Black Pig, which seems to her a battle between Ireland and England,
but to me an Armageddon which shall quench all things in the Ancestral
Darkness again, and from this to sayings about war and vengeance. ‘Do
you know,’ she said, ‘what the curse of the Four Fathers is? They put
the man-child on the spear, and somebody said to them, “You will be
cursed in the fourth generation after you,” and that is why disease or
anything always comes in the fourth generation.’
1902.