"pogrom." Not only had the seven signatories of the famous proclamation
been executed, but every day brought another victim to the wall and told
of another long list of sentences to penal servitude and other
penalties, while deportations--the old Cromwellian touch, when the West
Indies were peopled with Irish political offenders--reached the colossal
figure of over two thousand.
Militarism is of course always a last painful resort, but there were
some who seemed to look upon it as an end in itself. A writer in the
_Spectator_ said Lord Kitchener must be made Lord-Lieutenant, as the
situation called for a soldier, and the hero of Omdurman was the nearest
approach to the good old Cromwellian type.
The _Irish Times_, more English than the English themselves, then came
out with the following amazing solution:--
"We hope that martial law will be maintained in Ireland for many
months. When the time comes for its removal, the change to civil
government ought to be smooth and gradual. This end can best be
secured--in fact can only be secured--by the presence at the Viceregal
Lodge of a soldier who, having taken his part in government under
martial law, will be able to transmit the spirit of military
administration to the civil instruments of the State."
The situation had reached a crisis, and it was then, and not till then,
that the true feeling of the country came out in John Dillon's outburst
that be Sir John Maxwell's character what it might--and he confessed to
never having heard of him in his life--"he would refuse, and Ireland
would refuse, to accept the character of any man as the sole guarantee
of a nation's liberty," and the idea of military discretion fell dead at
the phrase, shot through the heart.
It was high time too, for, as the case of Sheehy Skeffington proved,
that discretion had been so discreet as to be unaware of its own acts,
the investigation being promised after execution, which was just our
whole complaint against the Germans in Belgium.[1]
The case was particularly striking, as it was only because he happened
to be a well-known public man that any attention was paid to it, and it
tended to give credence to the horrible rumours which now began to
spread through Dublin of the secret carnage which was supposed to have
taken place during what was euphemistically called "the rounding-up of
the rebels" and "house-to-house visitation," while the citizens of
Dublin were confined to their own houses under penalty of death if they
stirred out without a permit after certain hours: and one has only to
walk through the slums to hear the colossal proportions which these
rumours have already attained, and which nothing but public civil
investigation will stay.
I had noticed Sheehy Skeffington myself upon the Tuesday, looking very
anxious and perplexed, and walking by himself without arms, and the
point struck me at the time because of the remark of my companion that
it was rather strange that he did not seem to be in any way officially
connected with the rebels.
It was in Sackville Street--just at the time when the looting was being
carried on in North Earl Street, where they had been making a
barricade--and with a paper in his hand, possibly the very notice he was
contemplating, he went in the direction of the Post Office porch, as if
to go in and consult about something that was on his mind: again I
presume to try to stop the looting, for a couple of hours later I saw
the crowd of looters scattered several times by the firing of shots in
their direction; and when the Imperial Hotel was raided, a Sinn Feiner
told me not to be alarmed at this when leaving the city, as they were
only blanks and intended to prevent the wholesale robbery that was going
on.
As a matter of fact, as his wife afterwards explained, Skeffington, far
from taking any part in the rising, was actually helping to look after
the innocent victims of the affray, such as the Dublin Castle officer
who was bleeding to death in the street, and this at imminent personal
danger to himself; and at the time of his arrest near Portobello Bridge
was actually engaged in the work of trying to stop the looting, having
just come back from a meeting called to that effect, and had been
putting up the following poster:--
"When there are no regular police in the streets it becomes the duty of
the citizens to police the streets themselves, to prevent such spasmodic
looting as has taken place.
"Civilians (both men and women) who are willing to co-operate to this
end are asked to attend at Westmoreland Chambers (over Eden Bros.) at
five o'clock on this (Tuesday) afternoon.
"FRANCIS SHEEHY SKEFFINGTON."
Far from being a combatant, he was on principle a pacifist, and thus
opposed to all use of physical force; but perhaps it is better to let
his own wife tell the story:--
"After he was arrested and had been sentenced to death," to use the
statement which she issued to the Press, "he refused to be blindfolded,
and met death with a smile on his lips, saying before he died that the
authorities would find out after his death what a mistake they made."
Now, the concession of the mere possibility of such a colossal blunder
was, of course, the admission of the whole of John Dillon's
contention--namely, that, whatever might happen in Egypt, Ireland was
right in not accepting the discretion of any man as the sole guarantee
of her liberties.
For if it could happen in such an eminent case, there could hardly be
any doubt but that there was considerable truth in the rumours that
similar catastrophes were taking place all over Dublin, and indeed all
over Ireland, and this in such a way as to madden the Irish people, and
spread, if not insurrection, at least disaffection and bitterness from
one end of the country to the other; but it is useless, before an
official investigation, to go into such examples as the Eustace Street
and King Street cases. Public investigations at the moment, however,
would restore no lives, and possibly only endanger the chances of
reconciliation, which is the one great need of Ireland in the name of
Empire.
Quite apart from any examples, however, John Dillon maintained that the
system in itself was far more likely to prejudice than to attain the
very ends expected of it, "for, if they only knew it, the British
Cabinet had far less power in Dublin than the Kildare Street Club and
certain other institutions which were running the military authorities;"
but he struck the keynote of the situation when he said: "Ours is a
fighting race, and, as I told you when I was speaking before on the
Military Service Bill, it is not a Military Service Bill that you want
in Ireland. If you had passed a Military Service Bill for Ireland it
would have taken 150,000 men and three months' hard fighting to have
dealt with it. It is not a Military Service Bill that you want in
Ireland; it is to find a way to the hearts of the Irish people, and when
you do that you will find that you have got a supply of the best troops
in the whole world."
Yet what John Dillon resented most, as indeed every moderate man in
Ireland resented it, was the insinuation that the rising had been
nothing more nor less than an orgy of murder by a band of criminals, so
that it accordingly rendered every single Sinn Feiner liable to be shot
at sight, whether he had actually taken part in the insurrection or not.
For this conception the band of English journalists who had been sent
over under escort to the captured capital were much to blame. With pens
reeking with the description of Hunnish crimes, they wrote their
accounts of "nameless atrocities" which were supposed to have taken
place in Dublin, and which, if they astounded their English readers,
absolutely amazed their Irish ones.
The danger of this hate campaign which may be all very well when it is
intended to rouse the somewhat lethargic Briton to fight against a race
of which he knows next to nothing otherwise; but was doubly dangerous
when applied to one's fellow-countrymen in the name of a party, and were
it employed, say, against Wales or Scotland would soon prove disastrous,
for Scotchmen and Welshmen would rise in protest to a man--which is just
what Irishmen did at the "hate" wave.
Yet there was another reason--viz. the veracity and moderation of the
British Press--at stake: the Press on whose veracity and moderation
Irishmen depended for their motives for going away to fight for England,
and this excess tended, so to speak, to tear down every recruiting
poster in the country.
Now, had the British censor refused to allow any mention of the rising
at all in the English Press, it might have been unjust to Ireland, but
it would have been far juster to England. Much the same applies to the
English Churchmen and their Church. When the Rev. R. J. Campbell, in a
Sunday illustrated, discovered that Holy Writ had already long before
the rising declared in favour of Castle government and conscription for
Ireland, Irish sinners felt inclined to say: "So much the worse for Holy
Writ." And when the Rev. Lord William Cecil, preaching at Hatfield,
summed up the ethical situation in a confusion between the meaning of
pride and patriotism, Dublin wits thanked him for the phrase, and
remarked that indeed it had long been so, but ne'er so well expressed,
and amplified the cynical aphorism to "whenever Irishmen are patriotic
it is in reality nothing but pride, yet whenever Englishmen are
overproud it is nothing but the height of patriotism."
None, in fact, could have damaged the English cause in this crisis more
than the English did themselves, in spite of all the Irish Nationalists
were doing to help them out of the difficulty; for, as one wit remarked,
the whole catastrophe had been precipitated not by English Tories so
much as Irish Unionists--men, who it is difficult to say whether they
misrepresent England more to Irishmen than they do Irishmen to the
English, and a class which has ever got England into all Irish crises
and never got her out of a single one.
For the main point about the rebellion that struck Nationalists, who,
after all, were the vast majority of the Irishmen who at all mattered,
was not so much the incidental crime or heroism as the utter folly of
the enterprise. "Separatism" was, and will ever be probably, an
economic, racial, and Imperial impossibility; yet it was just this point
that was forgotten in the heat of the combat by Englishmen, with a few
noble exceptions, of course.
Instead of expounding the folly of the undertaking, they preferred to
dilate upon the criminality of methods and the character of the Sinn
Feiners, which is just where they fell into the most fatal mistake of
all and made the aftermath what it has been since--a far more
complicated problem to deal with than ever existed before the rising or
in the rising itself. Thus, when Sir Edward Carson raised his Volunteers
in Ulster he had calculated most upon the moral effect the spilling of
blood would have upon Englishmen. The Sinn Feiners had calculated upon
exactly the same psychological factor with their countrymen.
When the Government had refused to take their arms by force, which
Unionists were in their hearts hoping they would, the refusal left them
powerless and discredited, save in the eyes of cinema operators, who
only looked upon them as so much copy.
When the authorities proposed, after this example, to take the arms of
the Sinn Feiners and leave the other two bodies in possession of theirs,
they were, in fact, deliberately provoking rebellion; but not only this,
but unconsciously they were also strengthening the cause of the Sinn
Feiners, who, like the Covenanters, looked more to the moral effect than
to the material results of their efforts.
Once the link of race had been appealed to, of course every attack that
reflected in any way upon the character of the fighters was resented by
the whole nation as a matter of honour, and that was what led John
Dillon, provoked by countless insinuations and accusations to his
onslaught upon the principle underlying the wholesale executions and
deportations.
Had these penalties been inflicted upon those who had perpetrated the
"cold-blooded murders" of the first few days, whose cry for vengeance
had been voiced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it would have been equally a
matter of national pride to see the culprits were yielded up to justice;
but "it was not these murderers that were being pursued," as Dillon
pointed out; it was the rank and file of the insurgents, and these had,
by almost universal admission, behaved in a manner absolutely beyond
reproach as fighting men. He admitted they were wrong, but they fought a
clean fight, and they fought with superb bravery and skill, and no act
of savagery or act against the usual customs of war, that he knew of,
had been brought home to any leader or any organized body of insurgents.
The House was inclined to resent the tribute--as much as to say that
they were nothing but a pack of cowards--and this brought out a
characteristically telling taunt, namely, "that it would be a damned
good thing for England if her soldiers had been able to put up as good
a fight as did these men in Dublin--three thousand men against twenty
thousand with machine guns and artillery"--which, coming at the very
moment of the announcement of the fall of Kut, must have been
particularly galling.
Now, it was doubly a pity that such a controversy had been aroused, for,
as most intelligent people in Dublin had begun to admit, it had been a
heroic if tragically mad combat from the beginning.
Not that there had not been the most cold-blooded murders, I repeat,
upon the part of some of the rank and file within the first few hours,
when every representative of the law was suddenly attacked unawares, as
if there had been a formal declaration of war; but from the first moment
that they had felt their position nothing can be attributed to the rebel
leaders which was not in the most complete accord with military
precedent.
Indeed, not a few of the soldiers were struck by the self-control of the
Volunteers, and the sense of discipline that pervaded their ranks; nor
was it surprising, considering that while some of the Derby boys had
only been in khaki for a couple of months the Volunteers had been in
training ever since the beginning of the war, going through route
marches, manoeuvres, and sham fighting week by week and, towards the
end, night by night.
True, the money may have been appropriated from such Government supplies
as fell into their hands, and there is no doubt that technically they
had no right to such stores; but they had every precedent, and there is
even a story which tells of one of the leaders particularly asking one
of the captured military to see that the safe in the G.P.O. was not
touched.
There were certainly no cases of prisoners surrendering and being
instantly shot; nor did civilians complain of any wanton looting of the
occupied premises, though at Jacobs's and Boland's full use was made of
the stores; nor were there any of the Volunteers found drunk. Certainly
they should have prevented looting, but it was a duty as much incumbent
upon any civilian.
In other words, in so far as it could reflect upon the national
character, there was little that could be reproached against the
movement save its insensate folly and, of course, the technical
criminality of revolt.
On the whole the thing was on a far higher ethical plane than the
methods employed by the Fenians, as well as more widespread, and the
thing was far and away more dignified than poor Smith O'Brien's rising,
which ended, as it began, in a humble cabbage-patch.
Some of their bullets were of course of the vilest type, inflicting
ghastly wounds; but I heard of no misuse of the white flag--in fact,
when the ladies who had been found in the College of Surgeons were
offered their freedom as non-combatants because they had merely been
doing hospital work, they refused on the ground that as they were in
full sympathy with the movement they claimed the full honours of the
penalties of failure.
Two things, however, must be mentioned--the one was their use of
civilian clothes, and the second was their employment of "sniping"
methods, both of which were highly dangerous to the rest of the
non-combatant population.
With regard to the first--the use of civilian clothes--everybody who
possessed a uniform wore it, but the enthusiasm of the recruits outran
the means of equipment; and in any case it was adopted equally by the
military, who in not a few cases owed their lives to a quick change into
mufti, and who in other cases spent most of Monday and Tuesday in
Sackville Street in smart lounge suits as passive spectators of the
scene, when as a matter of fact they were merely spying out--and of
course rightly so doing--the movements of the Sinn Feiners, together
with their strength and dispositions, and then 'phoning up the
information to headquarters.
Naturally it was a method of operations which greatly endangered the
_bona fide_ civilian, but on the whole he suffered more at the hands of
the military than the Volunteer; in fact, over and over again I came
across instances, sometimes of ignorance, sometimes of anger, sometimes
of sheer recklessness, of the troops firing at anyone who appeared in
certain localities.
As regards the general "sniping" methods employed in the whole of the
Dublin rising it is hard to speak: certainly many of the Sinn Feiners
would have preferred a fight in the open, and the soldiers--especially
at Mount Street Bridge--felt it desperately unfair, but, under the
circumstances, it became the only chance of the rebels, just as the use
of shells was that of the military.
The extreme Irish loyalist merchant, of course, would have none of this;
he denounced them all with the words "cowards, murderers, and criminals"
in the full sense of the terms, and anyone who differed from him had
Sinn Fein sympathies, and was on the list of suspects, which was rather
unfair, not so much to the Sinn Feiner himself, who knew he could not
have got any justice from him in any case, but unfair to the soldier and
unfair to England. Thus, while elderly retired colonels and academic
professors called for drastic vengeance on the scoundrels, what
impressed such men as Colonel Brereton, who had actually had the
experience of falling into their hands in the G.P.O., was "the
international military tone adopted by the Sinn Feiners" and their
peculiarly high standard of character.
"They were not," he declared, "out for massacre, for burning, or for
loot. They were out for war, observing all the rules of civilized
warfare, and fighting clean. So far as I saw they fought like gentlemen
(?). They had possession of the restaurant in the Courts, stocked with
spirits and champagne and other wines, yet there was no sign of
drinking. I was informed that they were all total abstainers. They
treated their prisoners with the utmost courtesy and consideration--in
fact, they proved by their conduct what they were--men of education,
incapable of acts of brutality, though, also, misguided and fed up with
lies and false expectations."
Accordingly, upon their liberation, just before the surrender, the
Colonel was profuse in his gratitude for the most unexpectedly generous
treatment he himself and his fellow-prisoners had received at their
hands.
Such stories came as rather awkward comments on the indiscriminate
prosecutions that followed when the tables were reversed, and it was
rather a relief when English Conservative papers were at last forced in
the name of Empire to abandon the attitude taken up by Irish Unionist
organs in the name of the Castle; for it must have been compelling
evidence indeed that made the _Daily Mail_, of all newspapers, come out
with the following, so to speak, unsolicited testimonial, which many an
Ulster organ would have preferred to close down rather than publish:--
"The leaders were absolute blood-guilty traitors to Britain, but in some
ways their sentiments were worthy of respect," said the writer. "Theirs
was an intense local patriotism. They believed in Ireland. They believed
that she would never prosper or be happy under British rule. They knew
that there were 16,000 families in Dublin living on less than one pound
a week. They saw the infinite misery of the Dublin slums, the foulest
spot in Europe, where a quarter of the total population are forced to
live in the indescribable squalor of one-room tenements--I quote from
official records--and they believed that this was due to England's
neglect (as, indeed, it was), and that the Irish Republic would end
these things. Therefore they struck, and as far as they could exercise
direct control over the rebel army they tried to fight a clean fight.
They begged their followers not to disgrace the Republican flag. They
posted guards to prevent looting. They fought with magnificent courage.
Nevertheless, their control was not far-reaching, and they were
disgraced by the anarchy of some of their followers. But it is necessary
to point out their virtues, because it is those and their ideals that
non-rebel Irishmen are remembering to-day."
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Cf. the telegram received by the Prime Minister from the man in
whose discretion the whole British Legislature had placed its absolute
confidence: "Mr. Skeffington was shot on morning of 26th April without
the knowledge of the military authorities. The matter is now under
investigation. The officer concerned has been under arrest since 6th
May."
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
SINN FEIN--GERMAN GOLD
Two questions here confront us before going from the mere dramatic
narrative of the rebellion to its critical consideration.
The first is, What exactly is Sinn Fein? and secondly, How far was the
rising actuated by German gold?
The words "Sinn Fein" mean literally "We ourselves," _not_ "Ourselves
alone," and, as the title and expression of a movement, are the
antithesis of what they term "Parliamentarianism," or "help from
outside": but I know no better definition of it than the passage in the
writer in the _Irish Year-book_ article on "The Ethics of Sinn Fein."
"We are always telling the Parliamentarians that we need not wait for
the Act of the British Parliament to make Ireland a Nation. We ought
equally to remember that we do not require an Act of the British
Parliament in order ourselves to become pure or temperate, or diligent
or unselfish. Our liberty--our real liberty--the liberty both of
ourselves and our country--is in our own hands. England cannot crush or
kill it, or even seriously injure it. England can only remain in
Ireland, indeed, as long as our character is weaker than her guns. Guns
are stronger than middling character. Against real character,
passionate, determined, and organized, they are less availing than
children's catapults. English domination feeds and thrives on weak
character. When every Nationalist makes his or her character strong and
self-reliant and beautiful, English domination will die from sheer lack
of sustenance. If you are weak of will or base in your character, you
are as valuable a support to the English garrison in Ireland as though
you hated the Irish language and imported all your clothes from
Yorkshire. _The only way to be a patriotic Irishman is to do your best
to become a perfect man._"
The necessity for individual action, to continue the illustration of its
spirit, is emphasized by a very wholesome phrase. It is that "the only
part of the Irish Nation which a good many of us have any chance of
setting free immediately is ourselves." In other words, no Parliament
can make a nation free--not even a native Parliament; or, as Arthur
Griffith puts it, "Every Irish man or woman's self is the Irish Nation."
With this no one of course would quarrel, but it does not follow, as the
Gaelic element in Sinn Fein seemed to think, that "every Irishman who
does not speak Irish is against his will a representative of English
Domination in Ireland and striking a blow at his country's heart." For
when we come to consider it, English literature owes not a little to the
Celtic spirit, as on the other hand Ireland of to-day contains not a
little of the Saxon strain.