The day on which deportations were due was always tense and strained
throughout. We were generally warned a day or so in advance by the
soldiers, and sometimes had some of the names conveyed to us of those
who were destined to go. However they obtained this information, it
was always correct. This meant that from the time we awoke we were
all restless. About two o’clock an officer would enter and read a
list of names. Each of those so summoned would be given a knapsack,
and informed that he was to be ready to fall in on parade outside at
half-past two. No more was said; and no more was needed to be said.
Some were glad to go. It meant their removal from the danger zone,
and implied that the military did not know all that might have been
known. But these were few. For the most part men waited anxiously all
day, and if their names were called they made a brief comment, jocular
sometimes, and sometimes defiant, that intimated the dead weight that
had fallen on them with the news. Whatever courts-martial might sit,
so long as we were in Ireland we were at home. There was always the
consciousness with us that our own people were about us and bitterly
resented our fate. Whereas deportation was deportation. Moreover, one
of the men who had been deported a short time before had been brought
back again for trial, and his tale of what had been meted out to him in
an English jail was not pleasant to hear. Altogether, this breaking up
of bonds and transference to the conqueror’s own particular prisons was
a thing of dread, however that dread might be covered by jocularity or
grimness.
The first deportation after my arrival was on Saturday, May 20th. On
that occasion none was taken from our room. We crowded to the windows
to see the parade and to cheer our comrades by our presence there; but
we were shouted back by the officers, who were conducting the parade,
* * * * *
Our very friendship with one another had become an offence.
The following week there was another list of deportations. Three from
our room were taken, their places being filled the following day by
new arrivals from the country. On May 23rd my name was called, with
three others from the room. The previous day I had had an interview
with solicitor and counsel with a view to getting a statement of the
charges against me and to demanding a trial. An officer had been
present throughout the interview, although we had protested against his
presence. He was under discipline to the very men against whom it was
our intention to proceed, and it was a strange thing that he should
be present to learn exactly what our case might be and how it was our
intention to proceed. A further interview was arranged for two days
later, in order that counsel might turn up certain points of law. But
in the meantime I received notice that I was to be deported.
I had been, and then was, ill. I was really unfit to travel, especially
under these particular conditions. But that was a matter easily mended.
When I reported sick on parade I was taken over to the dispensary and
... ... Others who had been summoned to the parade were treated in the
same way; and we stood out there till about half-past four, when our
escort arrived. It was a beautiful afternoon; the sunlight poured down
through a cloudless sky and lay like a sultry blanket on the ground.
There were about a hundred and fifty of us, in two companies, for two
destinations. We stood there in ranks with soldiers guarding us, while
officers busied themselves with papers all about us. I thought of the
sun shining on the sea, and clothing the mountains with a new soft
beauty, and of the summer that began now to flow back over the earth in
Achill. There was time to indulge in reflection to the full.
At five o’clock our guards handed us over to the escort. The barrack
guard had been comprised of English troops. The escort was an Irish
regiment. Ironic, that an Irish regiment should escort Irishmen for
deportation to England. Stranger still when, as we were being marched
through the city, the people crowded about us to let us know of their
sympathy, and the soldiers were instructed to keep the people back with
their rifle-stocks.
* * * * *
We are sometimes derided as a people rent by divisions, but the division
in this case was due to the same cause as has created nearly all our
other divisions. That cause was symbolised by the scene that was
enacted that day. In no way more picturesquely could the fact of a
perpetual military conquest have been staged. And when, as we marched
down along the quays, most of us saw, for the first time, the havoc
wrought in our capital by the guns of the conqueror, that only gave the
appropriate scenery without which dramatists have agreed that the work
of their artistry cannot be given to the world.
At the North Wall we were put on board a cattle boat. The cattle were
herded at one end of the pens, we were being herded at the other end of
the pens. When it came to my turn to be penned I was surprised to hear
myself accosted by the Embarkation Officer:
“I’m B——, you know.”
“Certainly,” I replied; “we meet again.” But I had not the dimmest
notion who he was.
“I hope to be in Castlebar soon,” he said. “I haven’t been back since I
went out.”
“Is that so?” I said. “I was in Castlebar a fortnight ago. I was
stopping at the jail.”
He laughed, and turned to P. J. D., who stood beside me as we awaited
our turn to be penned. His manner was frank and pleasant and not at all
constrained, although his penning of us was quite efficiently done. I
informed him that I was not well, and asked if certain accommodation
could not be found slightly more efficient than a cattle pen packed
with my fellows. He promised to see what he could do, and went off.
When he had gone, P. J. D. informed me that he had been a Volunteer
when I was in command of the county, and had since gained some
distinction in the European War. Presently he returned, and conveyed
some of us to a room in the forecastle, where we had seats on which we
could stretch ourselves.
When we arrived in England, however, we struck quite another
atmosphere. Inquisitive crowds gathered about us who lost no
opportunity of displaying their enmity and hostility. German prisoners
of war might have aroused an equal curiosity, but they could not have
an equal enmity. Clearly and sharply we stood out, whether we gathered
on railway platforms or were marched through streets, as nation against
nation, with an unbridgeable hatred between us. Any attempt on our
part to meet taunt with taunt was at
* * * * *
; and so we were compelled to stand as the mark of contumely and the
target of contempt. To be sure, that only stiffened us, and we held
ourselves high and unflinchingly before the crowds. Nevertheless, there
was a sickening in most of us, for Ireland was behind us and we were
utterly in the stranger’s power.
I had lived some years in England, and had formed many good
friendships. Unlike many of my companions, England and the English
were no strange things to me. Yet I came then into something utterly
strange, foreign, and hostile. I could not more strangely have been led
captive among the mountains of the moon, so icy was this world and such
leagues apart from that which I had known.
Everything was coloured by that relation. One looked on England with
new eyes, and old thoughts became startling new discoveries. Stafford
lay for the most part steeped in slumber as we were marched through
its streets in the morning, accompanied by a small, inquisitive crowd.
It looked incredibly sleek and prosperous beside our Irish towns.
The villas were sleek and comfortable; the roads were sleek and neat;
the very grass beside the canal looked sleek as though nurtured with
the centuries. Everything had an air of being well fed and well
groomed, and quite consciously proud of the fact that it was part of
a prosperous whole, where no invader’s foot had trampled, where no
spoliation had dared to efface the moss that had gathered for centuries
on the gables, or to rough the smooth lawns. The villas might be the
latest examples of modernity, yet that was the air they suggested,
for they became part of something that was smooth and sleek. How
different to our Irish towns, that look as though they—not the people
in them, but they themselves—live a precarious day-to-day existence.
Each suggests the history of their nation. One has grown sleek with
prosperity, and smooth and round with the large air of the conqueror,
with shores that have never known invasion. The other has been hunted
from end to end by rapacious conquest; the forests that were its pride
burnt away the better to root out its people; the people hunted until
they lost the instinct to build for themselves permanent abodes, and,
more latterly, rack-rented till they stealthily hid any small savings
and kept middens before their doors, until a show of poverty from being
a disguise became a habit; rising against the conqueror in a series
of revolts foredoomed to failure, but triumphant in what they spoke
of—a spirit still unbroken; stricken to earth again by soldiery that
marched through the land; and harnessed by a network of legislative
acts that intended to inhibit industry and commerce with the nations of
the earth, and that succeeded in their intention. And yet there was no
question of a choice between the two. For with one individuality had
become smoothened away, the wheel having come full circle; with the
other individuality was sharp and keen, angular it might be, but alive
for the future.
H. P. and I were speaking of these things when we arrived at Stafford
Jail. It was about six o’clock in the morning as we were marched
through the gates and lined up outside the prison. The building looked
gloomy and forbidding as it frowned down on us with its hundreds of
barred windows. It had lately been used as a detention barracks; that
is to say, as a prison for soldiers, the major part of the population
of England having donned khaki but not having doffed their sins
therewith. Therefore, it was staffed by military, who received us from
our escort and marched us up the great building to the cells that had
been allotted us. And once again I heard the key grate behind me.