effort had been made to come to terms with the Ulster and the English Tory
Parties and had failed. It seemed as if the Government must either go
forward with its policy and take the risks or own defeat. It was assumed
as a matter of course that a foreign war ended _ipso facto_ all disputes
between the great English parties and that till the war should be over
internal opposition to the Government should cease. But what about
Ireland? Would the two Irish parties sink their differences in the same
way in the interest of the Empire? Would the Irish people give their
whole-hearted support and sympathy in the struggle to an England which had
so far failed to satisfy what they regarded as their elementary rights?
The choice fell to Mr. Redmond. On the one hand prudence counselled the
use of a unique opportunity: he might offer Irish support in return for
the immediate enactment of Home Rule and throw upon the Ulster Party the
onus of refusing to support the Empire in its deadly struggle. He might on
the other hand offer Irish support without conditions and leave the
satisfaction of the national claims of Ireland as a debt of honour to the
conscience of English statesmen. Had he bargained (and got his terms)
Nationalist Ireland would have been with him almost to a man: with that
simplicity of character, which, as the Greek historian says, "makes up a
great part of good breeding," he promised without conditions: England
might withdraw her soldiers from Ireland; the shores of Ireland, North and
South, would be guarded by her armed sons. The House of Commons, England
and the Empire were greatly impressed: the _beau geste_ of the Irish
leader was universally applauded. The Home Rule Bill was presented for the
Royal Signature and signed; a Suspensory Bill was hurried through
providing that its operation should be postponed; the Prime Minister
promised the enemies of Home Rule that before it was allowed to be put
into operation the Government would introduce and pass a Bill amending the
measure in such a way as to make it acceptable to its opponents; and Mr.
Redmond hurried home to rally Ireland to the cause of the Empire. The
situation was summed up later with brutal frankness by a Belfast Unionist
paper: "If the Nationalists will not enlist because the war is just, they
should not do so because they have got Home Rule; because they have not
got it. The Unionist Party has declared that when it comes into power it
will not allow the Act to stand." Even so between 40,000 and 50,000 Irish
Nationalists joined the Forces during the first year of the war.
By the time Mr. Redmond had returned to Ireland the attitude of all Irish
parties to the war had become pretty clearly defined. The Ulster
Volunteers, after about a month's hesitation on the part of their leaders,
had received official intimation that they were free to enlist. Any delay
there may have been was due, not to the feelings of the rank and file, but
to the tactics of the politicians, eager to extract the last possible
advantage from the situation. The bulk of the Nationalists, like the bulk
of the Ulstermen, were in sympathy with the cause of England and her
Allies as against Germany and the two parties sent recruits in almost
equal numbers. The attitude of Sinn Fein is put so clearly in a leader in
its official organ that it deserves quotation: "Ireland is not at war with
Germany: it has no quarrel with any Continental Power.... There is no
European Power waging war against the people of Ireland: there are two
European Powers at war with the people who dominate Ireland from Dublin
Castle.... To-day the Irish are flattered and caressed by their libellers.
England wants our aid and Mr. Redmond, true to his nature, rushes to offer
it--for nothing.... If England wins this war she will be more powerful
than she has been at any time since 1864 and she will treat the Ireland
which kissed the hand that smote her as such an Ireland ought to be
treated. If she loses the war, and Ireland is foolish enough to identify
itself with her, Ireland will deservedly share in her punishment.... We
are Irish Nationalists and the only duty we have is to stand for Ireland's
interests, irrespective of the interests of England or Germany or any
foreign country.... Let it (_i.e._ the Government) withdraw the present
abortive Home Rule Bill and pass ... a full measure of Home Rule and
Irishmen will have some reason to mobilize for the defence of their
institutions. At present they have none. In the alternative let a
Provisional Government be set up in Dublin by Mr. Redmond and Sir Edward
Carson and we shall give it allegiance. But the confidence trick has been
too often played upon us to deceive us again. If the Irish Volunteers are
to defend Ireland they must defend it for Ireland under Ireland's flag and
under Irish officers. Otherwise they will only help to perpetuate the
enslavement of their country.... Germany is nothing to us in herself, but
she is not our enemy. Our blood and our miseries are not upon her head.
But who can forbear admiration at the spectacle of the Germanic people
whom England has ringed round with enemies standing alone, undaunted and
defiant against a world in arms?" This was a clear declaration of
neutrality coupled with an offer of terms of friendship. But as the
negotiations in Parliament proceeded, as it became clear that, while Home
Rule was nominally to be passed, no effect was to be given to it for the
present, and no permanent validity to attach to the passing of it, the
tone of the Sinn Fein and Republican Press grew harder. "If the Home Rule
Bill," said _Sinn Fein_, "be signed, but not brought into immediate
operation, by the appointment of a Home Rule Executive Government, Ireland
is sold and betrayed. Let every Irishman get that into his head and keep
it there." "We regard no enemy of England as an enemy of ours.... It was
Grattan, the greatest of our constitutional leaders, who declared that if
the interests of the Empire clashed with the liberties of Ireland, then he
and every Irishman would say 'Live Ireland--perish the Empire.'" _Irish
Freedom_ which printed in capitals across its pages mottoes such as
"Germany is not Ireland's enemy," "Ireland First, Last and All the Time,"
said, "If England withdraws her troops utterly from Ireland the Irish
Volunteers will take and hold the country, hold it not alone against
Germany but against anybody else who attempts to interfere with it. And on
no other conditions will the Volunteers consent to move a step.... We are
not prepared to buy even freedom--were it offered--at the price of our
honour." It declared that "the psychological moment" had arrived for the
union of Irishmen, for the attainment of Irish liberty, and proposed for
the last time a working arrangement between the Irish Volunteers and the
Ulster Volunteers to further the real liberties of Ireland. The Labour
paper was even more outspoken. It ridiculed the parliamentary leaders for
their lack of ability in driving a bargain as compared with the more
astute Ulstermen; it ridiculed the advanced Nationalists who still talked
nonsense about a junction of the two forces of Volunteers: it declared
stoutly, "If England wants an Empire, let her hold the Empire.... Let no
Irishman leave his own land.... Keep your guns for your real enemies."
While it deplored the success of the recruiting campaign it allowed (with,
considering its own strongly expressed views, a commendable toleration)
articles to appear from Labour men giving their reasons for supporting the
war. But it had no illusions as to what was in store in the end for
Irishmen who put its ideas into practice. "For some of us," James Connolly
wrote, "the finish may be on the scaffold, for some in the prison cell,
for others more fortunate upon the battlefield of an Ireland in arms for a
real republican liberty." But as a last resort even Connolly proposed
terms of accommodation: he thought that the Volunteers by the bold policy
of refusing to move until their terms were conceded might force the
Government to repeal all clauses in the Home Rule Bill denying to Ireland
the self-government enjoyed by Canada and Australia. The last number of
his paper bore the legend "We serve neither King nor Kaiser." It had been
decided by all the political parties that then seemed to count in Ireland
that Irishmen must serve, if they served at all, not because they had
been given Home Rule but because they had not been given it--because
Ireland was still an integral part of the United Kingdom, bound to its
fortunes till the issue of the war should be determined. Three months
after war was declared the Sinn Fein, Republican and Labour papers were
suppressed by the police.
The public discussion of the terms upon which it might have been possible
to range even Separatists against Germany, the granting to Ireland of
something of her own to defend, being thus declared not to be in the
public interest, it seemed as if no obstacle remained in the way of
raising recruits all over the country. Irishmen were credited with a love
of mingling in a fight without any nice discrimination as to the grounds
of the quarrel or the merits of the dispute. "Is there not wars?" seemed
to some of the authorities to be a sufficiently potent appeal. But it was
found that there existed a confused and vague feeling that England as a
whole had at last, in spite of much English opposition, come to take a
friendly view of the Irish claim to self-government; that, if the war had
not occurred when it did, some way out of the difficulty would have been
found; that the Government was honest in its intentions and could hardly
be blamed for the tactics of its opponents. Even a slight and doubtful
indication of real friendliness on the part of England raises in Ireland a
response which must often seem to be out of proportion to the cause which
excited it; and at the beginning of the war Nationalist Ireland was ready
to respond to the call for men in a way which roused the cynical criticism
of the advanced wing of the Nationalist Party. "No English city," wrote
the _Irish Worker_ in September, 1914, "is displaying more enthusiasm than
Dublin in sending its bravest and best to murder men with whom they have
no quarrel." The Scottish Borderers, leaving for the Front, received an
enthusiastic send-off from the city in which a short while before they had
had to be confined to barracks; all over the country men were flocking to
recruit in the first few weeks of the war. Anti-English feeling was
practically smothered in a wave of enthusiasm. The Irish Volunteers, now
apparently under the assured control of the Parliamentary Party, became
the subjects of an almost embarrassing interest. Unionist peers and
gentry, retired militia officers and other people, not (to say the least)
distinguished for Irish patriotism, hastened to enrol in their ranks and
to proffer their services. The name of Major the Earl of Fingall appearing
as Chief Inspecting Officer of the Irish Volunteers in Meath in an order
signed by Colonel Maurice Moore, "Inspector-General, Irish Volunteers,"
would have seemed strange six months before and stranger still a year
afterwards. But it provoked little comment in August, 1914. It seemed as
if a miracle were about to happen and it became the apparent business of
the authorities to take steps to secure that it should not happen.
Enlistment had not been growing in popularity in Ireland for some years
before the war. In 1908, _Sinn Fein_ had pointed out with satisfaction
that the army returns showed that the number of Irishmen in the regular
army had then fallen to the lowest point upon record. The Boer War and the
anti-recruiting propaganda in Ireland had not been without their effect
upon Irish feeling and the real position and work of the army in Ireland
had been closely scrutinized. "The Curragh Mutiny" had provoked some very
pointed comments upon the spirit which really animated the army in
Ireland: it came to be looked upon as the citadel and symbol of all the
forces that opposed the claims of Ireland. "We all know in our hearts,"
said Roger Casement and Eoin MacNeill in a manifesto published in April,
1914, in the _Irish Volunteer_, "that the 'Union' means the military
occupation of Ireland as a conquered country: that the real headquarters
of Irish government on the Unionist principle is the Curragh Camp to which
the offices of Dublin Castle are only a sort of vermiform appendix." And
the functions performed by the army in Ireland would certainly have seemed
strange to anyone who felt any attachment to the views generally accepted
in England as to the relation of the army to the civil power. In the
General Orders for the guidance of the troops affording aid to the Civil
Power in Ireland, issued in 1891, the following paragraph is to be found:
"All officers in command of corps or detachments are to transmit to the
Deputy Adjutant General an immediate report of any outrages, large
meetings held or expected to be held for political or other purposes, or
occurrences that may take place in the neighbourhood of their posts
connected with the state of the country, whether they have or have not
been called upon to afford assistance to the civil power." The functions
of an army acting upon instructions like these are hardly to be
distinguished from those of an army of occupation, and Nationalist Ireland
was well aware of the efficiency with which these functions were
performed. To make enlistment popular in Ireland, even in a moment of
enthusiasm, was thus a work requiring a certain amount of tact and
discretion.
The first real difficulty arose with the Volunteers, whose services as an
army of defence had been pledged by Mr. Redmond to the Government. The
pledge had been given without the consent, or even the knowledge, of the
Volunteer Committee and they resented the implication that they could be
disposed of as if they were the private property of other people. They had
been enrolled with a definite object and any duty for which their services
were to be given must be shown to be at least not inconsistent with that
object. The committee, however, so far endorsed Mr. Redmond's offer as to
pass a resolution declaring "the complete readiness of the Irish
Volunteers to take joint action with the Ulster Volunteer Force for the
defence of Ireland." The Prime Minister promised in Parliament that the
Secretary for War would "do everything in his power, after consultation
with gentlemen in Ireland, to arrange for the full equipment and
organization of the Irish Volunteers." Whether the powers of the Secretary
for War were less extensive than the Prime Minister believed, or whether
the "gentlemen in Ireland" had other views, the scheme drawn up by General
Sir Arthur Paget and his staff "by which the War Office may be supplied
from the Irish Volunteers with a force for the defence of Ireland" was
rejected by the War Office. This, it is true, made little difference in
the end, for the Volunteer Committee, when the scheme was submitted to
them, demanded the inclusion of certain "primary conditions" which it was
not at all likely that the War Office would have accepted: but the
immediate rejection of it by the military authorities in England is
significant of the spirit in which the question of Irish recruiting was
approached. It was hostile not only to Irish ideals but to Irish
sentiment, to everything except the use to which Irish soldiers might be
put. The contrast between the treatment accorded to Irish Nationalist
recruits and the privileges granted to the Ulster Division can only be
explained on the assumption that the War Office desired to show
appreciation of the latter and suspicion of the former. The Ulster men
were allowed to retain their own officers and their own tests of
admission: the "regiments" formed under the Provisional Government of
Ulster were taken over, without alteration, by the English authorities:
they were allowed to refuse Catholics or Nationalists who offered to
enlist in their ranks: their recruiting marches were accompanied by bands
who played Orange party tunes through Catholic and Nationalist hamlets
while they went through the farce of lecturing the inhabitants on their
"duty to the Empire in this crisis." In November, 1914, an advertisement
appeared in the Dublin _Evening Mail_ announcing that a new Dublin Company
of the Royal Irish Fusiliers was to be formed to which none but Unionists
were admissible, intending recruits being directed to apply at the Orange
Hall. The Ulster Force was trained as a body in camps of its own, while
Ulster Nationalists had to take train for the South or were shipped to
England. Similar privileges were bluntly and persistently refused to the
Nationalists. The Ulstermen had their own banners: the Nationalists might
not fight under any emblem but the Union Jack, the symbol of the defeat of
their nationality, of the very Act of Union against which they were known
to be in protest. Treatment such as this could have only one result: the
people who decided upon it must have known what the result would be, and
by persisting in it showed that the result was desired. By cooling down
the enthusiasm of Nationalist Ireland they made it possible to declare
that Nationalist Ireland was "disappointing expectations" and to hint that
they had suspected all along that it was less eager to fight than had
appeared. Incidentally the result was held to justify the suspicions which
had brought it about. Irish soldiers were divided into two categories:
those whom the authorities delighted to honour and those whom they decided
to employ. It must be added that these manufactured animosities faded away
in the stress of battle. Ulstermen and Nationalists fighting side by side
covered themselves with glory and did equal credit to the old land; and no
more stringent criticisms of the treacherous and malignant policy that
divided them can be heard than from the lips of some of the men who
survived the glorious ordeal of the Somme.
But an influential body had from the first decided that the duty of
Irishmen, and especially of Irish Volunteers, was to remain in Ireland;
these were the members of the original Volunteer Committee and their
adherents: outside the Volunteer ranks they were supported by Sinn Fein,
the Republican Party and the Citizen Army. To them the supreme and
immediate duty of Irishmen, and in a special degree of the Volunteers, was
to safeguard the liberties of Ireland--a duty to which the fact of a
European war was irrelevant, except in so far as it might afford an
opportunity to strengthen and secure Irish liberty. There is little doubt
that some members of this party hoped that Germany would be victorious,
not in the interests of Germany but in the interests of Ireland, which had
little prospect of winning concessions from an England rendered invincible
by the overthrow of her most formidable rival: some of them regarded the
war as a mere struggle for commercial supremacy in which Ireland had no
interest at stake: but they would all alike have defended the shores of
Ireland against a German army which invaded them for the purposes of
annexation and conquest. To all alike the proposition that Irishmen had
any duty to enlist for foreign service in the English army was a denial of
the very fundamental article of their creed. When Mr. Redmond, then, in
his address to the Volunteers at Woodenbridge in September, 1914, urged
them to enlist for service overseas the inevitable crisis was provoked.
But the original provisional committee were now in a minority in the
counsels of the organization they had founded, and they were hampered by a
fundamental (and, indeed, intentional) ambiguity in the Volunteer pledge.
"The rights and liberties common to all Irishmen" was not a phrase which
carried its interpretation on its face. It was open to the Volunteer
followers of Mr. Redmond to say that the democracy of Great Britain had
conferred upon Ireland a "charter of liberty" and that it was the duty of
Irishmen to fight for Great Britain, keeping faith with those who had kept
faith with them. It was open to others to say that "the Thing on the
Statute Book" fell far short of conferring upon Irishmen the rights and
liberties to which they were entitled, and that the duty to secure first
that to which they were entitled precluded them from the prior performance
of any other task. The members of the original committee who took the
latter view could also urge that Mr. Redmond's original pledge that the
Volunteers would "defend the shores of Ireland" was not capable of the
gloss that "the shores of Ireland" under the circumstances was a
legitimate figure of speech for the trenches in the front line in France.
The difference of interpretation developed into a split. The members of
the original committee met in September and called a Volunteer Convention
for November 25, 1914, at which it was decided "to declare that Ireland
cannot with honour or safety take part in foreign quarrels otherwise than
through the free action of a National Government of her own; and to
repudiate the claim of any man to offer up the blood and lives of the sons
of Irishmen and Irishwomen to the services of the British Empire while no
National Government which could act and speak for the people of Ireland is
allowed to exist."
Before the split the Volunteers had numbered about 150,000; and it would
appear that the great majority of these at first sided with Mr. Redmond.
Many of them enlisted: many of them, under the title of the National
Volunteers, continued to exist as a separate body in Ireland: some at
least of them afterwards found their way back into the ranks of the Irish
Volunteers.
From the time of the Volunteer split the air was cleared politically in
Ireland: for the first time people began to know precisely where they
stood. The National Volunteers and the Parliamentary Party under Mr.
Redmond's leadership were committed, as were the Unionists, to the
unreserved and energetic prosecution of the war: all the other parties,
Sinn Fein, the Republicans, the Irish Volunteers, and the Citizen Army
adopted an attitude of watchful neutrality. Their view was bounded by the
shores of Ireland or when they cast a glance abroad it was as the
husbandman observes the clouds. They continued to differ (sometimes
sharply and vehemently) from one another: but the public, with a prophetic
disregard of the mere obvious present, began to label them
indiscriminately as Sinn Feiners. In truth common adversity was drawing
them closer together, and the apparently heterogeneous elements which went
to make up the Sinn Fein of present-day Ireland were being welded into a
unity of aim and resolution.
The results were soon apparent. During the month or so when the Volunteers
enjoyed the fleeting sunlight of aristocratic favour, the Foreign Office
had written (18th August, 1914) to H.B.M. Consul-General at Antwerp to
assist Mr. John O'Connor, M.P., and Mr. H. J. Harris in arranging for the
shipment to Ireland of certain rifles belonging to the Volunteers,
permission to export them having been obtained from the Belgian Government
by the Foreign Office. It was, no doubt, an oversight that no ammunition
for them was obtained, or could be obtained afterwards; but the rifles
came. Three months later an officer of the Volunteers who was employed in
the Ordnance Survey was dismissed without charge or notice and ordered to
leave Dublin within twenty-four hours. He was only the first of a series
of Volunteer organizers who suffered deportation under similar
circumstances. The Birmingham factory which was engaged in making guns for
the Volunteers was raided, its books and correspondence seized, and it was
ordered not to remove any goods from its premises. To be an Irish
Volunteer was to be "disaffected," and to be "disaffected" was to be
liable to summary measures of repression.