found themselves covered by the old man with a double-barrelled
shot-gun. Cormac had expected that his father would show fight, and
knowing where the electric light switch was in the hall, had arranged
with his men that when he turned the light off they should throw
themselves flat on the floor.
As the light went out the mac Nessa fired both barrels, which went
harmlessly over the raiders’ heads, and before he could reload they had
him down and tied up. Cormac then turned on the light, and by now,
half-mad with rage and excitement, would have gone for his father; but
his men kept him back, and when they had secured all the arms in the
house under Cormac’s directions, they hustled him away.
In the meantime Dominic with a party of Cadets had raided Ryan’s house,
but, of course, drew blank.
Early the next morning a mounted messenger brought word to the barracks
in Ballybor that Cormac and a party of armed and masked men had raided
Murrisk during the night and removed all arms and ammunition. That
afternoon Dominic put up large notices all over Ballybor to the effect
that if he caught Cormac in the town he would horsewhip him in the
market-place.
Both the town and countryside were in a wild state of excitement after
the Murrisk raid, Cormac’s supporters acclaiming his victory, while
Dominic’s could only reply, “Wait and see.” And so keen were Dominic’s
party to help their man, that information of every possible kind and
description literally poured into the barracks by every post.
Like children, as ever, the people quickly forgot that they were either
Loyalists or rebels, the blood-feud between the two brothers being far
more interesting and exciting; and it is probable that, if only
sufficient arms had been forthcoming on both sides, the brothers’ feud
would have developed into a pitched battle, and if the police had
interfered both parties would then have joined forces and turned on the
common enemy.
After leaving Murrisk, Cormac, knowing that Ballybor would now be too
hot for him, made for some caves in the Slievenamoe Mountains to the
east of the town, and here he remained. Some time before these caves had
been fitted up like dug-outs in France, while the food supply gave no
difficulty, every house at the foot of the mountains having to supply
rations on requisition for any gunmen using these caves. Here Cormac had
plenty of time on his hands, and thought out a clever plan to put
Dominic out of action.
Shortly before Cormac raided Murrisk, a new and simple manager had
arrived at one of the Ballybor banks. The arrival of a new bank manager
in an Irish provincial town is always the signal for all in financial
difficulties to get busy and try their luck with the fresh arrival, and
amongst the new manager’s first visitors came the Urban Council, who by
sheer bluff managed to get their already big overdraft increased by some
thousand pounds. A fresh election being within sight, they then
proceeded to borrow a derelict steam-roller from the County Council, who
had practically ceased to function, and to spend the money steam-rolling
the streets of Ballybor. In this way they hoped to catch the votes of
the labourers by the payment of high wages, and of the shopkeepers and
owners of cars by improved streets.
Being in a great hurry to get on with the good work, they forgot that
the streets had never been steam-rolled before, and that the gas-and
water-pipes were very near the surface, with the result that for every
yard of street the roller passed over one or more gas- or water-pipes
burst, and the town soon smelt like the inside of a gas-works.
The consequent proceedings give a very fair idea of the Celtic capacity
for public affairs, and of how the country would be run under “Home
Rule,” or any other kind of rule except the “Union.”
Instead of stopping the steam-rolling until all mains and pipes had been
relaid at a sufficient depth to resist the rolling, they solemnly
proceeded to roll, burst, and mend from one end of the main street to
the other, to the huge delight of all the local plumbers, who also had
votes.
Luckily the money was exhausted by the time the main street was
finished, and though the greater part of the surface was excellent, the
ridges made by digging up the pipes at intervals would break the axle of
an unsuspecting stranger’s car, to the great benefit of the local
garages.
The police barracks at Ballybor are situated in a “cul-de-sac” off the
main street, at the corners of which stand the principal hotel and a
bank, and all cars going to or from the barracks must pass this corner.
Word was brought to Cormac in his mountain dug-out that his brother left
Ballybor Barracks early every morning with a Crossley full of Cadets,
and that they spent the whole day and often most of the night searching
the surrounding country for him. Before leaving Ballybor he had
witnessed the steam-rolling comic opera, and bicycling by night to
Ballybor, he lay up during the day, got in touch with a plumber,
borrowed his tools and barrow, and late that afternoon (in the plumber’s
clothes, and slouch hat pulled well over his face) started to dig up the
road between the bank and the hotel.
Human nature always seems to regard the digging up of a street in the
light of a huge joke, and during his work Cormac was not only chaffed by
the bank manager and the hotel loafers, but by the police themselves.
When it was dusk he was joined by a Volunteer with a charge of
gelignite, which had been raided from a Government ship off the
south-east coast and brought to the west by car, and the two proceeded
to lay a contact-mine in the centre of the road. They then filled in the
earth, returned the tools and barrow to the plumber, and bicycled back
to the mountains.
While Cormac was busy laying his mine, Dominic and Blake were poring
over an Ordnance-map in the barracks not sixty yards away. Having come
to the conclusion that it was quite useless to search the countryside
piecemeal, and hearing a rumour of what was going on in the mountains
through one of the forced food contractors having made a bitter
complaint to a passing police patrol, they were now planning to surround
the southern half of the Slievenamoe Mountains, and organising a great
drive, and the next two days were spent working out the details.
About 9 A.M. a mineral-water lorry, in order to turn, backed up the
cul-de-sac, and the mine being well and truly laid, disappeared in a
sheet of flame, wrecking the bank and hotel. Hardly had the sound of the
explosion died away, and before the police left the barracks to
investigate, every young man in Ballybor of the shopkeeper class had his
bicycle out and was off as hard as he could pedal. A Volunteer greatly
resembles a mountain hare: directly the hunt is up he makes at top speed
for high ground, and the harder you press both the faster they leg it up
the mountains. Blake and Dominic managed to control their men, and no
reprisals followed, the only arrest being the unfortunate plumber who
had lent his outfit to Cormac, and whose bicycle had been “borrowed” by
an agitated shop-boy.
At the present time a big drive in the west presents great difficulties.
Very few, often none, of the R.I.C. or Auxiliaries know anything of the
many wild and mountainous parts in their districts, and the soldiers are
invariably complete strangers.
To reconnoitre the ground beforehand is out of the question, and it is
difficult to induce reliable guides to act.
The part of the mountains Blake and Dominic had selected to drive lay
about nine miles due east of Ballybor, divided by a deep pass from the
remainder of the range to the north, and ending in a wild rocky valley
intersected by the Owenmore river to the south, and the total area to be
covered was about eighteen square miles of mountains, glens, cliffs, and
bogs. It was not possible to start operations before 3 A.M. (the month
being August), and they would have to stop soon after 11 P.M. (summer
time), which gave them roughly twenty hours to beat the eighteen square
miles.
Taking the total number of troops at their disposal, Blake divided them
into groups of six, giving them nearly a hundred groups. Then Dominic
picked out from a contoured Ordnance-map the same number of points
surrounding the mountains, from all of which there was a good view and
field of fire, and it was arranged that as many groups as possible
should have either a Vickers machine-gun or a Lewis gun.
The actual drive was to be carried out by the police. The Cadets under
Dominic were to start from the north end in a crescent formation and
advance towards the highest point, which lay nearly in the centre of the
area, while the R.I.C. under Blake were to advance from the south.
Dominic knew every yard of the mountains, having shot grouse there with
his brother since boyhood, but the difficulty was to procure a guide for
Blake’s party, none of whom had ever set foot on the mountains. With
much persuasion, however, Dominic at last induced a man, who had been
one of the mac Nessa’s game-watchers on the mountains for years, to act
as guide. This man had to be promised a large sum of money, and to save
him from the revenge of Sinn Fein, it was arranged that directly after
the drive he should be safely got away to enlist in the British Army
under an assumed name, and, if he wished, be sent straight off to India.
All officers and N.C.O.’s were given maps showing the position of every
group marked, and it was arranged that the police should be in position
at 3 A.M. and the troops half an hour later. A few days before the date
fixed for the drive Dominic and his Auxiliaries disappeared from
Ballybor, and it was given out that they had gone to Co. Cork.
Sharp at 3 A.M., on a perfect August day, the drive began. Dominic and
the Cadets had to start from the shores of a large lake lying in a cup
at the top of the pass, and climb a thousand feet before reaching the
first valley in the mountains. At the top they halted for a breather and
to admire the wonderful view. To the east the summer sun was fast
rising, all around them stretched miles of heather-clad hills, and away
to the north-west lay the sea, a pearly grey-blue in the fast growing
light.
After a rest Dominic got his men into formation, spreading them out as
far as possible without losing touch, while he kept a small party in the
rear to go to any threatened point where the gunmen might try to break
through the cordon. The Cadets had brought their signallers with them,
equipped with a heliograph and flags, who remained with the reserve
party.
On reaching higher ground Dominic could see with his glasses the small
groups of soldiers taking up their positions, while far away in the
plain to the eastward the Owenmore river wound like a blue thread
through the dark bogland. A Cadet on his left nearly walked on a pack of
grouse, which swung right-handed, passing within twenty yards of
Dominic, and reminding him vividly of other days.
Very soon the Cadets began to feel the heat of the sun, and the hard
going began to tell on several of them. Sitting in a Crossley is bad
training for walking a grouse mountain.
After going about a mile and a half a party of men were seen in front
making eastward at full speed down a valley, the end of which Dominic
knew was held by a group of soldiers with a machine-gun. Halting his
men, he then brought his right wing well round so as to cut off the
gunmen’s retreat to the west should they attempt to break back.
The fleeing gunmen were soon lost sight of in dead ground, but presently
the sound of firing was heard from the far end of the valley, and after
a time the gunmen were seen retreating across the Cadets’ front, and
making as hard as they could for the west side of the mountains.
At this point Blake’s men came in sight from the south, and quickly
getting in touch with the Cadets’ right wing, completed the cordon. The
gunmen, seeing that they were surrounded and all retreat cut off, split
up into two parties, took up positions on two kopjes, and waited for the
attack.
As a frontal attack would have entailed heavy loss, and seeing that
there was another kopje on Blake’s side which would command and enfilade
the gunmen’s positions, Dominic ordered the Cadets to pin the gunmen
down by their fire, and at the same time sent a signaller to Blake
telling him to occupy the commanding kopje. This Blake did, and also
sent to the nearest group of soldiers for a machine-gun.
The fight lasted for two hours, and though the gunmen were always
subject to a hot fire, and several times a man was seen to spring into
the air and collapse in the heather, yet they stuck it gamely until the
machine-gun was brought up and opened a heavy fire on both kopjes; the
remaining gunmen then stood up and put up their hands.
On the two kopjes the police found twelve dead gunmen and twenty-eight
prisoners, eighteen of whom were wounded. And amongst the dead Dominic
found Cormac, shot through the heart.
After arranging for the burial of the dead (with the exception of
Cormac, who was carried down the mountain-side on a stretcher) and the
removal of the prisoners, Dominic took a party of Cadets to search some
caves which he knew of about half a mile to the south-west. Here, as he
expected, he found that the gunmen had been living in comparative
comfort. One cave had been used as a living-room and contained chairs
and tables, while two smaller inner ones were fitted up with bunks in
tiers like a Boche dug-out, and had heather for bedding.
Towards evening the worn-out Cadets got back to their Crossleys on the
pass road which ran along the north shore of the lake; and after leaving
a party with a searchlight mounted on a tender to stop any stray gunmen
escaping during the night on bicycles by the road to the east, Dominic
started for Murrisk in a Crossley with his brother’s body.
Many an evening the two brothers had driven home together over the same
road after a happy day’s grouse-shooting, never dreaming that their last
journey together would be to bring Cormac’s body to the home of their
ancestors.
The mac Nessa met the party in the great hall of Murrisk, and his
ancestors looking down from the walls must surely have thought that they
were back again in their own times of everlasting war and sudden death.
XV.
THE AMERICAN NURSE.
In the early ‘eighties there lived in the Cloonalla district a small
farmer named Peter Walsh, who was what is generally called in the west a
bad farmer, which is simply the Irish way of saying that he was lazy and
good-for-nothing, and for several years Walsh had been in the clutches
of the Cloonalla gombeen man, the local big shopkeeper.
The ways of the gombeen man are quite simple and usually most
successful, the success largely depending on a run of bad potato crops,
as generally after two successive failures the majority of the farmers
in a poor mountainous district have no money at all. They are thus
forced to go to the gombeen wallah, who advances them so much money,
according to the size of their farm and their capacity for drink, as a
mortgage on the farm at a high rate of interest. But instead of paying
them money he gives credit for goods, and there is a verbal agreement
that he will not foreclose as long as the farmer deals solely with him
and makes no bones about the prices he is charged. Formerly this was the
terrible millstone which used to hang for life round the necks of many
western peasants.
However, Walsh’s millstone troubled him not one bit, and he “staggered”
along for several years until there came a sequence of three bad and
indifferent crops, which finished him completely. Seeing that Walsh was
not going to make any effort, the gombeen man closed on the farm, and
Peter, the wife, and their one child, Bridget, aged three years, left
Ireland for America, illogically cursing the British Government for
their own sins and those of the gombeen devil.
Now the gombeen man had no use for Peter’s farm himself, so he proceeded
to make Peter’s brother, Michael, drunk one Saturday night in his shop,
and made the farm over to him with the former conditions, not forgetting
to double the mortgage.
In due course Michael died without kith or kin saving Bridget, now a
hospital nurse in New York, who one day received a letter from a
Ballybor solicitor informing her of her uncle’s death, and that she was
the sole heiress to his two farms in Cloonalla, and asking for
instructions.
From her youth upwards Nurse Bridget had heard nothing but abuse of the
so-called English tyranny in Ireland—in fact, up to the time when she
went to be trained hospital nurse, her only knowledge of England and
Ireland was the thousand and one supposed wrongs which Ireland had
suffered at the hands of England since the days of Cromwell, and her one
ambition in life was to see the downfall of the British Empire, and with
that the freedom of her fatherland. In America, the Irish children find
plenty of mentors of hate of England, both among their own people and
the Germans.
In time, when Bridget began to earn some money as a nurse, she joined
every Irish anti-British society, secret and otherwise, she could, and
at the time of her leaving the States to take over her uncle’s farms
possessed more wonderful and weird badges and medallions than she could
conveniently wear at once: incidentally the societies relieved her of
most of her earnings “to provide powder and shot for ould Ireland.”
On the liner, Bridget met many of her race, mostly men and women who had
worked hard for some years in the States and saved enough money to
return to Ireland, where they hoped to buy a small farm or shop and
never to wander any more. One and all were longing to be in Ireland once
again, and not one ever mentioned a word of the “brutal English tyranny”
until Bridget started the subject.
Bridget landed at Queenstown, made her way to Cork, and set out on the
long and tedious cross-country railway journey to the west. At the best
of times the journey is a slow one, but during 1920 it became much worse
owing to the great uncertainty of any train reaching its destination.
Trains were even known to stand in a station for days on end while the
driver, the stoker, the guard, and the station employees argued and
re-argued what they would do and what they would not do.
Twice during the journey Bridget had glimpses of the brutal British
soldiery when two military parties wished to travel on the train, and
the driver and guard refused to start until the armed assassins of the
British Government left. At first Bridget was slightly confused; no
doubt the soldiers were terrible blackguards, but at the time they
seemed to be quiet and inoffensive, and she remembered frequently having
seen American soldiers in the trains in the States, and the drivers and
guards there made no objection.
However, a fellow-passenger explained to her that the soldiers used the
Irish railways to go from one part of the country to another in order to
murder the unfortunate soldiers of the Republican Army, and that the
guard and driver, as became good citizens and soldiers of the Irish
Republic, were quite right to refuse to aid and abet the British by
carrying them on the train.
At a junction some thirty miles from Ballybor she changed into a
composite train carrying passengers and goods, and soon after leaving
the junction the train pulled up suddenly in a cutting, and there was
loud shouting and firing. Bridget was greatly alarmed and excited,
thinking that she would now see the British troops commit some of the
terrible crimes she had heard so much about in the States—she had heard
nothing of the crimes of the I.R.A.
It takes a long time in the west of Ireland to do anything, and it was
quite twenty minutes before Bridget realised that this was a hold-up by
the I.R.A., and that all the passengers were to get out and line up at
the top of the cutting. The confusion then became terrific, half the
passengers going up one side of the cutting, and the remainder up the
other.
Wild-looking masked bandits then started shouting to the people to come
down and go to the other side, whereupon a general post ensued.
Finally, the whole lot was collected together, searched, and at last
allowed to take their seats in the train again; but the performance was
not by any means over yet. Next, the waggons were all broken open, the
contents thrown on the line, and then returned except Belfast
merchandise, which was made into a heap—coffins, cases of jam and tea,
boxes of linen, &c.—sprinkled with petrol, and then set on fire.
Bridget arrived at Ballybor on a summer’s evening, and at once set out
for Cloonalla. Ballybor appeared a mean and dirty little town to her
American eyes, and she hoped for better things at Cloonalla—a good hotel
and decent stores. After an hour and a half’s drive the carman pulled up
outside Cloonalla Chapel, and asked his fare where she wanted to go to.
Not realising where she was, Bridget replied, to Cloonalla, the best
hotel in Cloonalla, only to learn to her astonishment that the place
boasted only one shop and no hotel of any kind. And in the end she was
thankful to accept the hospitality of a farmer’s wife, and share a
stuffy bed with the woman’s daughter.
Bridget received a shock when she saw her uncle’s house—she said that
they wouldn’t put a pig in it in America—and the idea she had had of
settling down there quickly vanished. However, she determined to stay on
awhile in Ireland, and help to the best of her ability the famous
soldiers of the I.R.A. (she had not realised yet that the bandits who
had held up the train were the famous soldiers) of whom she had heard so
much in America.
On visiting the solicitor in Ballybor, she found that her uncle had left
her a few hundred pounds, and this she gave to the man Hanley, with whom
she lodged, to buy cattle with to stock her farm.
As soon as Bridget had settled down she found ample scope for her
political ambitions both in Cloonalla and Ballybor, where most of the
young people of her own age found talking sedition far easier and more
amusing than hard work; and as everybody seemed to have money to burn,
she had a great time—political meetings, drilling, picnics, and dances.
And after joining the Cumann na Ban she volunteered for active service
with the local company of the I.R.A., little knowing what was before
her.
At first the game was amusing enough, teaching the young men the
rudiments of first aid, and lecturing to the girls and youths of
Cloonalla in the school-house in the evening, followed by dancing until
the early hours of the morning; and probably Bridget would have gone no
further than this but for the unfortunate arrival of two professional
gunmen in Cloonalla, who had been sent from Dublin to carry out the
usual series of outrages and then to vanish before the storm burst.
The gunmen came with a list of local undesirables (from the I.R.A. point
of view) to be removed—many of the names had probably been given out of
private spite through the means of anonymous letters, a very favourite
practice in Ireland—and at once proceeded to work, or rather to see that
the Cloonalla Volunteers did the dirty work.
The following week seemed to Bridget like a horrible nightmare, starting
with the murder of ex-soldiers, who paid the full penalty of being so
stupid as to believe that the British Government would protect its
friends and supporters in Ireland, and culminating in the revolting
crime of the murder of a Protestant clergyman, who was seventy-nine
years of age.
Early in the morning, before the household was up, the old man heard a
loud knocking at the hall door, and on coming downstairs found the usual
party of armed and masked men, who ordered him to follow them. He did
so, and had no sooner reached the road than they shot him dead,—to be
found by his old wife—the servants dared not leave the house—lying in
the middle of the road in a pool of blood.
That night the gunmen vanished, and with them the orgy of crime ceased
for a time at any rate. There is no doubt that these revolting and
apparently purposeless murders are instigated by the I.R.A., but
nevertheless they are carried out by the peasants in most cases, and
they will have to bear the stigma now and always. Under a determined
leader they appear to take kindly to “political murder.”