mind to return to the States as soon as she could dispose of her farms,
and to this end bicycled into Ballybor to arrange with an auctioneer to
sell the farms for her by public auction at the earliest possible date.
The following day the auctioneer inspected the farms, and declared that
she ought to get at least a thousand pounds for her interest in each
farm, and fixed a near date for the auction, though he was very doubtful
if the I.R.A. would permit it, and advised her to try and obtain their
consent. But the last thing in the world Bridget wanted was to have any
further dealings with the I.R.A., and the auctioneer left promising to
do his best.
That night after the Hanleys and Bridget had gone to bed they received a
visit from the captain of the Cloonalla Volunteers, who wanted to know
if it was true that Bridget was going to try and sell her farms by
public auction. Bridget told him that it was quite true, and that she
was going to return to America. Whereupon he told her that the I.R.A.
would not allow this, and that if she wanted to dispose of her land a
Sinn Fein Court would value it, and the Republican Government would then
take it over and pay her in Dail Eireann Bonds (to be redeemed at their
face value when Ireland is free and the Republic established), and after
telling her to stop the auction he left.
In a few days Bridget received an order to attend a Sinn Fein
Arbitration Court in Cloonalla Chapel at night, where the judges valued
her farms at one hundred pounds each (loud applause in Court by the men
who hoped to get the farms), and ordered her to hand over the land the
following day to the Cloonalla Volunteer captain, who had every
intention of keeping the farms himself.
Bridget protested loudly that she was a citizen of the United States,
that the farms were hers, and that if this was a free country like
America she was entitled to get the full market value for them, which
she had been told was quite two thousand pounds; and lastly, that she
had proved herself a good patriot, and burst into tears.
All of no avail—the judges gave her three days to get rid of her cattle
and hand over the land, at the end of which time if she had not complied
she was to be deported, and her farms and cattle confiscated.
Bridget returned to the Hanleys’ house to find her boxes packed and
dumped in the road, together with her bicycle, and the door of the house
locked, and this in the middle of the night. After trying in vain to
gain admittance she sat down on one of her boxes and started to cry.
Towards dawn she again made a piteous appeal to the Hanleys to be
allowed to stay in their house for the rest of the night, and that she
would leave the following day; and for answer Mrs Hanley cursed her, and
warned her that if she was not gone before daylight her hair would be
cut off, and “God only knew what else would happen to her.” In a blind
terror she mounted her bicycle and rode madly into Ballybor, where she
had to wait some hours in the streets before she could gain admittance
to a lodging-house.
Bridget was made of the right stuff, and with the daylight and the
contact with friendly human beings her courage returned, and she went to
see the auctioneer once more, but received cold comfort. The man had
been warned not to hold the auction, but was willing to, provided he had
police protection (he saw his trade slipping away if he did not), and
suggested that she should go and see the D.I.
Blake listened patiently to her tale of woe—he already knew the part she
had played with the Cloonalla Volunteers, but liked the girl’s looks and
her pluck, and at the end promised her protection for the auction, but
warned her that he could not protect her afterwards, and advised her to
get out of the country as soon as she could.
Bridget then hired a car and drove out to Cloonalla to try and collect
her belongings. The boxes were still there by the roadside, but empty.
And on going on to her farms she found that the fences and gates were
smashed and her cattle gone. She tried in vain to get information of
them, but found that not a man, woman, or child would tell her anything.
Returning to Ballybor, she again saw Blake, who promised to send out
police to try and find her cattle. The following day the police went out
to Cloonalla, rounded up the first score of men they met, made them
build up the fences, mend the gates, and lastly, gave them two hours to
return Bridget’s cattle.
The I.R.A. now turned the full blast of that potent weapon, the boycott,
on to the unfortunate Bridget. Not a soul would or rather dare speak to
her—at any rate in public. Little children meeting her in the streets or
country roads ran away, fearing lest she might cast an evil eye on them.
Shopkeepers were forbidden to supply any goods to her, and the
lodging-house people would have put her out on the streets but for the
interference of the D.I. By this time Blake was determined to see her
through, and when the auctioneer attempted to rat, made him think better
of it and stick to his agreement with Bridget.
The day of the auction arrived, and with it the biggest crowd Cloonalla
had ever seen. In fact, so dense was the throng that when Blake drew up
with the auctioneer and Bridget, he was afraid to let his men near the
crowd lest they might be rushed. Standing up in a Crossley, he ordered
the people through a megaphone to form three sides of a square facing
the road, and, as soon as they had complied with his order, he told the
auctioneer to get out and carry on with his work on the fourth side of
the square. This he did, and, after describing the value and virtues of
the farms in the usual flowery language of his kind, asked for a bid.
There followed a deadly silence of fully two minutes. Again the
auctioneer called for a bid, and yet a third time—not a man in the huge
crowd dared open his mouth. Land-hunger is the predominant trait in a
western peasant’s character, and many men in that crowd would have
risked their souls for Bridget’s farms; but so great was the power, or
rather the fear of the I.R.A., that not a single man dared speak.
Seeing that it was useless to go on with the farce, Blake ordered the
auctioneer to return to the car. At once the crowd broke with an angry
roar, and made an ugly rush towards the road, but a volley of blank in
the air quickly stopped them, and they turned to scatter in the opposite
direction, while the police party returned to Ballybor.
That night, when she went to bed in the lodging-house, Bridget locked
her door and piled all the furniture she could against it. About 2 A.M.
some one knocked loudly at her door and bade her open, but she lay still
and gave no answer. She could then hear the raiders entering the other
rooms of the house, and the screams of inmates, followed by the curses
of the raiders.
The girl lay shaking in bed, knowing that it was only a question of time
before they came again, and when they did it gave her almost a sense of
relief. This time they did not knock, and she could hear whispering,
followed by a man wearing rubber soles running down the passage, and
then a crash as he hurled himself against her door.
The door was rotten and gave, but the furniture still held it up, and
the other men then put their shoulders against it, and finally it gave
way altogether, and the whole lot pitched into her room in a heap on the
floor.
As Bridget screamed, the men flashed their electric torches on to her,
and by the light she could see that they all wore painted white masks,
which completely covered their faces except the eyes and mouth. One
great brute then seized her by the hair, and dragged her screaming down
the stairs and into the street, where the others held her while the big
man shaved her hair off with a razor. They then lashed her wrists and
ankles, gagged her, and flung her in her nightdress into a waiting Ford,
which disappeared into the night.
A police patrol, guided by the screams, arrived on the scene just as the
Ford was disappearing in the direction of Castleport. Sending a
constable back to the barracks for a car and more men, the sergeant in
charge searched the lodging-house, only to raise a fresh alarm among the
terrified inmates, most of whom were under their beds.
In a few minutes the car arrived, and the police raced off after the
Ford as fast as the Crossley would travel.
For some time the police had had a strong suspicion that a creamery
about half-way between Ballybor and Castleport had been frequently used
by the I.R.A. as a detention prison, and as they drew near the place
they saw lights disappear from the windows.
After surrounding the building, the sergeant knocked at the door and
received no answer. Being afraid to delay lest they might be attacked,
he told his men to take one of the two thick iron-bound planks carried
under the body of the Crossley, and used for crossing trenches on the
roads, and to use it as a battering-ram on the door. At the second blow
the door splintered, and a third made a hole large enough for the police
to pass in.
The sergeant now advanced into the building, revolver in one hand and
torch in the other, and had nearly reached the back when shots and
shouts were heard, and at the same time he saw a man disappearing
through a door ahead of him and fired.
On reaching the door he was met by his own men, who said that three men
had tried to escape that way, and that they had shot two, the third
escaping.
They then searched the building, and found Bridget lying in a kind of
coal-cellar, half-dead from fright and exposure, and, wrapping her in a
policeman’s greatcoat, took her back to the lodging-house, leaving a
guard there for the rest of the night.
The next day Bridget fled to England, to return to America from
Southampton. Nothing in this world would have induced her to spend
another night in Ireland.
She left the sale of her farms in the hands of the auctioneer, who, to
his great surprise, some time afterwards found a buyer at a low figure
in a man who came from the north.
The police saw the northerner into his new home, and left him there. The
following morning the man staggered into the Ballybor Barracks, and when
he had sufficiently recovered, he told Blake that soon after he had gone
to sleep he was awakened by volumes of smoke, and on getting out of bed
found that the house was on fire. Seizing his clothes, he just managed
to get out before the blazing roof fell in.
Outside he was met by a roaring crowd, who beat him nearly to death with
sticks, and while he lay on the ground he could hear the screams of his
horses and cattle being burnt to death in the blazing outbuildings. The
crowd then left him for dead, well pleased with their night’s work.
After some hours he recovered and managed to crawl into Ballybor.
XVI.
FATHER JOHN.
The tiny village of Annagh lies on the eastern slope of the Slievenamoe
Mountains, about fifteen miles due east of Ballybor, and consists of one
dirty street with, roughly, forty-nine miserable tumble-down hovels and
one grand slated two-storied house, as usual the shop and abode of the
village gombeen man, who also kept the Post Office—not because he was
the most honest man in the village, but because there was nobody else
able to do so.
A good many years ago, on a bitter winter’s night, a tinker, answering
to the name of Bernie M’Andrew, drove his ass-cart into the village of
Annagh, and called at the only shop to know if there were any kettles or
cans to be mended. The night was so cold and wet that the old
shopkeeper, in the kindness of his heart, bade the shivering tinker put
up his ass and spend the night. The tinker stayed and never left.
M’Andrew’s stock-in-trade, when he arrived at Annagh on that winter’s
night, consisted of half a barrel of salt herrings, a kettle, the usual
tinker’s soldering outfit, a policeman’s discarded tunic, and the rags
he stood up in. Within a year M’Andrew had buried the old shopkeeper,
who had lived alone for years and was beloved by all, and reigned in his
place.
Being an ambitious tinker, M’Andrew started a gombeen business with the
old man’s savings, which he found by chance in the secret drawer of an
old desk, and in a very short time became the best hated and most feared
man in the district.
At first M’Andrew supported Sinn Fein enthusiastically, but when he saw
law and order beginning to disappear, being now a man of property, he
became alarmed, and tried to run with the hare and the hounds.
M’Andrew’s great opponent was the young parish priest, Father John, who,
after serving as a chaplain with the British Army in France with great
distinction—he had been decorated for bravery in the field by both the
British and the French—returned to Ireland, having seen enough bloodshed
for his lifetime.
Father John was a grand man both physically and morally and in the right
sense of the words, and if only the majority of young Irish priests were
up to the standard of Father John there would be little trouble in
Ireland to-day.
When he became the parish priest of Annagh, Father John saw at once that
M’Andrew was fast reducing the great majority of his parishioners, who
were poor men with poorer mountain land, to a state of slavery, and
realised that it only wanted two bad years in succession to put the
whole parish under the gombeen man’s thumb.
At first he tried to keep the farmers away from M’Andrew’s shop; but
this they resented, as it entailed a journey of many miles to the
nearest town, and then they had to pay nearly as much as to M’Andrew.
Next he denounced M’Andrew and his evil practices from the altar,
warning the people of the consequences; but in spite of all the priest
could do or say the gombeen man flourished.
From the very first Father John opposed the Sinn Fein movement both by
word and deed, and when the first Sinn Fein organisers appeared in his
parish he quickly hunted them away; but before he knew what was
happening practically every young man in the parish had been enrolled,
whether he liked it or not, as a soldier in the I.R.A. M’Andrew was
quick to seize his chance of revenge, telling the people that the priest
was a secret agent of the British Government—hadn’t he served in the
British Army and taken the pay of the British Government, an enemy of
the people?—and that he was doing his best to stand between them and
liberty. In a week Father John was practically an outlaw in his own
parish, and M’Andrew became the popular hero.
Though he still officiated in the chapel, Sinn Fein saw to it that he
was paid no dues. For nearly two years this state of affairs continued,
and it would have been impossible for the priest to live if the older
and more sober members of his flock had not come to his house secretly
in the dead of night and paid him their dues.
One day, when feeling ran very high, Father John opened his daily paper
to see his own death reported, and a long obituary notice, probably the
handiwork of M’Andrew.
It was a situation common in Ireland—the peasants blind to the virtues
of their truest friend, and making a popular idol of their worst enemy:
it is a sad thing that many Irishmen will always insist in believing
what they wish to believe.
Father John was by nature a kindly and genial man, a lover of sport, of
a good horse, and of the society of men, and those two years must have
been a perfect hell on earth for him. Not that any one was ever openly
rude to him; they just sent him to Coventry and kept him there, hoping
to break his heart, and that by refusing to pay him any dues they would
gradually freeze him out, and in his place would come one of those
fire-eating young priests who would lead them to victory and freedom.
The summer of 1920 was wet and cold, with frosty nights during every
month except July. Now, if your potatoes grow in boggy land, and there
comes heavy rain followed by a night’s frost, not once but several
times, you will have no potatoes, and probably very little crop of any
kind. And if your living depends on the potato crop, you stand a good
chance of starving, unless the gombeen man will come to your assistance.
By November the whole parish of Annagh practically belonged to M’Andrew,
who held a mortgage on nearly every acre of tenanted land, and proceeded
to bully the people to his heart’s content.
On a Sunday morning in December, at about 10 o’clock, the hour when the
village usually began to come to life, the inhabitants were startled by
the screams of a woman, and when they rushed to their doors saw
M’Andrew’s servant running out of the village towards Father John’s
house. M’Andrew had been murdered during the night without a sound, and
the servant had no idea of what had happened until she went to his room
to see why he had not got up. All M’Andrew’s books had been burnt, and
afterwards the murderers must have cursed the day they did not set a
light to the house as well.
On the next day the village woke up to find a company of Auxiliaries
billeted in M’Andrew’s house and the yard full of their cars—a case of
out of the frying-pan into the fire.
For some time past the police had known that men on the run were hiding
in the mountains near Annagh; but though the area came within Blake’s
district, it was impossible to keep any control over it, owing to the
fact that the Owenmore river and the Slievenamoe Mountains lay between
it and Ballybor.
The Auxiliaries spent the day fortifying M’Andrew’s house, and that
night started operations, and the inhabitants soon realised that the
British Empire was not yet an “also ran.”
Just as it was getting dark the Auxiliaries in Crossleys would suddenly
burst out of M’Andrew’s yard, travel perhaps five or ten miles at racing
speed, and then surround and round up a village or district, so that the
numerous gunmen who had come from the south for a rest cure found it
impossible to get any sleep at all.
The local Volunteers at once sent an S.O.S. to Dublin, and received the
comforting answer that a flying column would arrive shortly in the
district and deal effectively with the Auxiliaries. In the meanwhile
they were to harass the enemy by every means in their power and carry on
a warfare of attrition—in other words, if they found one or two Cadets
alone—if unarmed so much the better—they were to murder them.
At first the local Volunteers were very much afraid of the Auxiliaries,
Sinn Fein propaganda having taught them to expect nothing but murder,
rape, and looting from the “scum of English prisons and asylums”; but
after a few days had passed and nothing dreadful happened to man or
woman, they took heart once more and started their usual warfare.
The Auxiliaries were commanded by a Major Jones, and on the Sunday
following their arrival in Annagh Jones left alone in a Ford at an early
hour to see Blake in Ballybor. The road crosses the mountains through a
narrow pass, and near the top of the pass there is a small chapel, a
school, a pub, and a few scattered cottages.
On his return Jones passed this chapel as the people were coming out
from Mass, blew his horn, and slowed up. After passing through the crowd
he noticed a group of youths standing on the right side of the road, and
opened his throttle wide, thereby probably saving his life.
When the car was within ten yards of the group every man drew a pistol,
and it seemed to Jones as though he was flying through a shower of
bullets. However, though the car was riddled, and had any one been
sitting in the other three seats they would all have been killed, Jones
found himself uninjured, and the old “tin Lizzie,” responding well to
the throttle, flew down the hill at twice the pace Henry Ford ever meant
her to travel at.
That evening Father John called on Jones and apologised for the outrage,
and Jones at once fell under the charm of the priest. Probably his
astonishment at Father John’s visit had something to do with it, but in
the days to come, when Father John supported his words by deeds, Jones
learnt that his first impression had been a correct one.
Returning in the early hours of the morning from a raiding expedition to
the south of Annagh, the Auxiliaries were surprised to see a tall priest
standing in the middle of the road and holding up his hand. Fearing a
trap—there was a blind corner just behind where the priest was
standing—they stopped about two hundred yards off and beckoned to the
priest to advance.
They were still more surprised to find that the tall priest was Father
John, who, having received information after they had started that the
Volunteers were going to lay trees across the road at this corner in the
hope of smashing up the Auxiliary cars, had spent the whole night
walking up and down the road in order that he might warn them of their
danger.
Father John drove back to Annagh with the Cadets, and by the time they
reached the village every Cadet swore that the priest was the finest man
they had yet met in Ireland, and they didn’t believe there was a finer
one.
From that on Father John accompanied the Auxiliaries on many a stunt,
and there is no doubt that he gave them every help in his power and all
information which reached him; but though he would travel anywhere with
them, he would never accept hospitality from them, nor would he enter
M’Andrew’s house.
About six miles from Annagh, in a hollow of the mountains, is the tiny
village of Glenmuck, completely isolated from the rest of the world, and
so situated that its presence was quite hidden until you literally
walked on top of it. None of the inhabitants, who lived chiefly by
making poteen in the winter time and going to England as harvesters in
the summer, possessed a cart, for the very good reason that the nearest
so-called third-class road was five miles away, and only a goat track
passed within a mile of the place.
Here in due course arrived the flying column of the I.R.A., seventy
strong, every man mounted on a bicycle and armed with a British service
rifle and as many pistols as he could find room for. They were also the
proud possessors of a Lewis gun.
As usual, the gunmen were billeted so many in each farm, and after being
badly harassed for some time in the south, Glenmuck seemed like Paradise
to them. The nights were spent in dancing, card-playing, and drinking
poteen. Somewhere about noon the gunmen got up, and after breakfast
visited each other in their different billets after the fashion of our
troops in France, walking about openly with their rifles slung over
their shoulders. The Lewis gun team passed their days teaching the boys
and girls of the village the mechanism of the Lewis gun.
The leader’s idea was to give his men much-needed rest and amusement for
a few days, and then to try and ambush the Auxiliaries; and probably
they could have spent quite a long time resting here without the
Auxiliaries having the slightest suspicion of their near presence. But
war seems to be made up so largely of “ifs,” and the “if” in this case
proved to be Father John.
When out riding on his rounds one morning, the priest noticed that most
of the young people of his parish appeared to be gravitating in their
best clothes towards Glenmuck, and suspecting a poteen orgy, he sternly
commanded a young damsel to tell him why she was going to Glenmuck, and
the girl told him. Father John rode straight back to Annagh, to be just
in time to stop Jones from starting off on a raid in the opposite
direction.
Jones first sent off a Cadet on a motor bicycle to Blake at Ballybor,
sending him a verbal outline of his plan of attack on Glenmuck, and
asking him to co-operate with the Auxiliaries from the other side of the
mountains. He then turned out every Cadet in the place, left M’Andrew’s
house empty to take care of itself, and made off at full speed in the
direction of Glenmuck with the priest acting as guide.
They reached the nearest point to Glenmuck on the road at noon, and
after leaving a small guard over the Crossleys, the rest of the company
set out in open order across the mountain for the flying column’s lair.
The gunmen had had great luck in the south for a long time, and their
luck still held. A youth, making his way across country to get a sight
of the wonderful gunmen, happened to look behind him when on top of a
rise, and saw about a mile away the oncoming Auxiliaries. Being a sharp
youth he realised who they were, and ran for the village as fast as his
young legs would carry him, and by chance ran straight into the leader
when he entered the outskirts of the place.