Читать книгу Ireland in Travail - Sydney Loch - Страница 9

Table of Contents

During our first months, September, October, and November, Ireland passed into a state of war. The country had been going there step by step, by way of raid and arrest on the one hand, and hedge and ditch shooting on the other; but the walk turned to a run and the run to a slide when the system of reprisals began. As summer turned into autumn, and autumn wore out, the hate and terror engendered by the deeds of either side were to beget the shameful happenings of the winter, so that Ireland, like a woman frightened during her time, produced a monster when her hour came.

The three months saw the mellow sunshine of an Indian summer exchanged for dreary autumn skies, saw the tender mauves and lavenders of the flowers in Phœnix Park—flowers which for delicacy of hue I have not seen exceeded in any part of the world—decay and change for hardier blooms; witnessed the soft starlight nights become the early evenings and the discourteous hours when, through the curfew—at this time from twelve to three—wind swept the desolate streets. The months witnessed the fear, which had been gathering over the land in clouds, come down upon the country in rain.

To what page shall one turn in the book of history, on what paragraph shall one put a finger and say—“Here was the beginning! Here ended Ireland’s golden age.”

Was it fifty years ago, was it a hundred years ago, was the beginning made when Strongbow and his knights crossed the Irish Sea? Centuries before an English foot had trodden Irish soil, Irish kings had been perishing as soon as the crown was settled on their brows. Then who shall place a finger upon any page? There is no place; there was no clean cut beginning.

Never have the gods been kind enough to Ireland to give her a united national opinion, which might have knit her together; nor has Ireland succeeded in absorbing her successive waves of invaders and making them one people. The Celt with his hoary tradition passes through the mists of long ago, driving westward before him the Firbolg, the inarticulate aboriginal of the country. In turn follow other more masculine peoples, sweeping after the Celt, sweeping to the west and the south the melancholy Celt with his age-long memory.

You must go south and west to find the Celt, and to-day you are not likely to find him pure anywhere. But his mark is in many places. This Celtic blood, when blended with other more masculine bloods, makes a rich mixture.

As a result Ireland has become a house with three tenants who are constantly calling upon the landlord—the first to tell him that he requires no repairs to the house and is willing for it to be left as it is; the second declaring that the house is in sad disrepair and that something must be done; the third announcing he will have nothing more to do with such a shameful landlord. Thus the Unionists, the Nationalists, and the Republicans.

The landlord all this while, hearing several opinions and pleading inability to distinguish the right one, does what is easiest and suits him best, and leaves things as they are. It is small excuse that Britain should have been so tardy with justice; but it is probable that she would have been swifter righting Ireland’s wrongs had she heard a united voice in place of many.

The illustration of landlord and tenant suits better than any other; but it smacks unpleasantly of possessor and possessed. Let us be clear. The landlord of Ireland is that single people made out of the four separate peoples of the British Isles.

Let us turn to a more profitable question. When were the beginnings of Sinn Fein?

Who shall say so late in the day what might have checked the growth of this movement? May Sinn Fein have been a distemper which, contracted, must be gone through with? May it have been something altogether different, a coming to rebirth of a people, as the nearly drowned man is brought back to life with pain and tears? Is it that the gods decide such and such a thing shall befall and determine when it shall take place? The Gaelic League went before Sinn Fein like John of old. “After me shall come another mightier than I.” It is sufficient that the movement had a beginning, and like an avalanche gained way as it moved.

First, in 1893, the language movement and talk of a Celtic revival. A Dublin professor becomes inspired, and disciples gather about him to master an antique tongue. Dr. Douglas Hyde, in everyday life a pleasant sociable man, is touched with the geist when he pleads for the Gaelic tongue. The movement grows, pen and pencil are snatched up, and the remotest country-side is explored for folklore and fairy tales. There arrives the Celtic illuminator with his paintbrush and his parchment, and the Celtic jeweller, hammering out his brooches old fashioned a thousand years ago. The prophets awaken—the seers of visions, the dreamers of dreams. One dreams of the avatar that is to come, and sees a phantom drummer drumming about the land. A second, reading a telegram of the Russo-Japanese war, receives the intuition that Japan is the masculine pole of the earth and Ireland is the feminine pole, and that some mystic union of the two peoples will bring order into disorder. A third, on Howth Hill, sees bloody giant figures moving across the sky. A fourth, on the top of a tram, sees letters of fire in the heavens.

The national fire burning more brightly and more steadily. All the while Arthur Griffith’s paper, The United Irishman, calling to the nation to come together.

Then, about 1906, the birth of Sinn Fein, in those days not a thing of the sword; but a mild and respectable movement claiming Ireland’s right to develop along her own lines to nationhood. Half a dozen years and this movement making little headway, then 1914, Ulster thwarting Home Rule and the Citizen Army getting itself together; next 1916 and the Easter Week rising. A thousand romantic men strike at Britain in her extremity and rouse her at last.

Was that week which followed the Easter rising the time when a pitiless policy might have brought this movement to an end? The general who could ably have struck the blow was in Ireland at the time. The movement was not yet a national matter. A thousand men had stood together in what they believed was a splendid burst of chivalry; but the nation was still impatient of them, thought them a little ridiculous. A hammer was at hand to be used. Had the blow fallen, would this live thing called Sinn Fein have been killed outright?

The hammer did not fall; it gave a tap or two. Sixteen men were executed, and numerous restrictions followed; restrictions which did not affect considerably the law-abiding citizen, but were intended to fetter the growth of a distinctively national spirit. Once again Britain was loth to cripple, discovering a quality for which her enemies refuse her credit; but for which she may receive credit some day when national bitternesses have gone out of fashion. She tapped here, she tapped there; and she succeeded in rousing to a renewed courage that live thing, Sinn Fein.

Two years of repression, and the Irish Republican Party coming to life again like the Phœnix under the flag of Sinn Fein. Here a policeman shot, there a house burned. The British Government replying with a new repressive measure. Other houses levelled, and in answer sterner repressive measures; other policemen murdered, and still sterner repressive measures. So the descent into war.

It is understandable that the youth of Ireland, represented by the Irish Republican Army and the Cumann na mBan, should throw in their lot with a movement which had a gentle beginning as a Celtic revival. First of all the great European war had passed most of Ireland by; and the spirit of combat and sacrifice, which had bred giants on the Continent, must have trailed the fringe of its garments into all corners of the British Isles. There was the great Capital and Labour unrest, which must have rippled across the Irish Sea in course of time. The Irish peasant boy, with his plough and his pigs as a horizon, with America as an ultimate limit of vision, was in a state to welcome any change in the procession of his days; and along comes the patriot with his splendid story.

The unprejudiced person admits that the British Government passed by first challenges and insults, and in the beginning the task of Irish Volunteer was more exhilarating than onerous. It presented itself to the gaping ploughboy as a great adventure at little cost. Here was opportunity to defy authority, to expand into something more eloquent than a cowherd. So a beginning was made.

But in time the duties of a volunteer spelt more than an inspiring game. They called ever and anon for a man’s whole courage. But there was come a new thing to take the place of the bait of splendour which had sufficed in the beginning. The flame of a national being had burst alight. The prize of sacrifice for an ideal was now offered to the dazzled feeder of swine.

This burst of nationalism, which had been lighted and fanned quite falsely by the first enthusiasts, penetrated from the cities to the villages; and the laggard to join the I.R.A. became inspired by example. Thus the army swelled its ranks, thus the national spirit was fanned as if by a bellows. And a third agent went to work in intimidation. The village lout who hesitated to enlist found it the worse for him. That youths joined the I.R.A. in haste to repent at leisure is borne out by orders issued by Republican authorities concerning deserters. But every wide movement of necessity gathers a certain scum, and there is no denying this national awakening was to turn many a village clown into a staunch soldier of the Irish Republic.

A fact to be examined at this point is the surprising absence of people of breeding in the ranks of Sinn Fein. The rank and file of the movement was drawn from the working classes, while the leaders for the most part belonged to the lower middle classes. It would seem as if the Sinn Fein movement was a peculiar national expression of the world-wide conflict between servant and master. Europe as a whole, the world indeed, was in the throes of the Capital versus Labour question, and the Sinn Fein movement was Ireland’s personal expression of the revolt of the humble person against authority.

There was, of course, a sprinkling of gentry in the movement.

The Dublin universities illustrated how opinion and class went together. The students of Trinity as a rule are gentlemen of birth, and as a body they were loyal to the Crown; the students of the National University, who are drawn from the middle classes, to a man declared for Sinn Fein.

I have tried to be free of prejudice as I tramped the Dublin streets, yet I say out of my heart if one met a prosperous person, a spruce person, such person, nine times out of ten, proved a loyalist.

After a month in Ireland I could pick out the Irish Volunteer. He wore a dirty velour hat, a shabby raincoat, and generally had his hands in his pockets. There was a youthful, cheeky type, belonging to the National University, and there was a dirtier, rather more prepossessing type, drawn from the errand boy and working classes. There was a better type still, which came from the country.

One had only to notice the Republican Volunteer rubbing shoulders in the street with the British officer, to comprehend these people belonged to two poles, which could never meet. Barriers of class, education, and standards were between them—it was Capital and Labour over again. The British officer, from his stupendous height, regarded the Sinn Feiner through the big end of the telescope, classed all connected with Sinn Fein as “Shinners” and valued them as such.

The Irish struggle did not develop along the lines of an ordinary war. It was not the late European war on a smaller scale. It was the case of an immensely powerful man fighting the shadow of a man.

The Republican Army had no uniform, or more correctly found it impolitic to wear uniform, and the volunteers were on and off active service as a man puts on and off a coat according to the change in weather. Your butcher, your baker, the man who cleaned your boots might be an Irish Volunteer, and when orders came, and opportunity, might make an end of you. A franc-tireur I understand this type of soldier to be; but in reality the I.R.A. had many of the strengths and weaknesses of a numerous and hastily built up secret service.

The British Government had to contend with another difficulty—it could not make a straight ahead attack, it could not level every house in a row. The Government had the power to do this; but not the opportunity. They were fighting only the shadow of a man. In every row half the houses might be friendly ones, and who could say which were which? For it was only in the winter of 1920-21 that the nation became welded, and that one could count on most people in the street being followers of Sinn Fein.

On the one point of uniform the British Government was able to stigmatise the Irish Volunteers as murderers, and this stand it took up, applying the phrase “murder gang” to them. The Irish Volunteers had to pay the penalty of being termed murderers, of being hanged as murderers when caught red-handed instead of getting the treatment of prisoners of war; but more than balancing these disadvantages was the boon of becoming this shadowy foe, which could not be brought to bay.

Unless the country was flooded with troops and artillery—and such a plan had many difficulties in the peculiar circumstances—the affair was likely to be long drawn out. A long-drawn-out campaign was all to the advantage of Sinn Fein. In the first place the world must gradually come to notice the Irish resistance, and the “murder gang” cry of the British Government would hardly ring true if operations were drawn out to the length of a war. Again, time was to the advantage of Sinn Fein in recruiting its strength. As, month after month, raid and arrest went on, and the cities and country places were patrolled by troops not of the country, and wrongs and injustices followed one upon another—wrong houses were raided, wrong arrests were made—friend after friend, neutral after neutral became foe. The impartial observer could see the nation laid on an anvil as it were and welded into a blade of defence.

The shoot-and-run murders continued in the country places, from the country murder found its way into the cities; and the phantom enemy continued to move round and about but would not come into the open. I heard an exasperated soldier cry out, “Let us give them ten days to get uniform and then declare war properly. Let us treat every man taken in uniform as a prisoner of war, and let us shoot out of hand every armed man caught out of uniform. Their war, as they call it, will be over in a week.”

There was truth in this. As a fighting machine the I.R.A. was outnumbered and so ill equipped that had pitched battles taken place, it would not have existed on the seventh day. Consequently the disadvantages of no uniform were far outweighed by the advantages.

I have no doubt the Republican leaders weighed up things and decided on the course of action they considered most profitable, and though for propaganda purposes an outcry was made when a volunteer, caught red-handed, was hanged, yet I believe the Irish leaders saw the logic of this, and looked upon the event as one of the misfortunes of war. I have always found the leaders to take a more professional view of things and to be less emotional than the follower on the skirts of the movement.

As matters went from bad to worse the British Government proceeded to wage the war in the only way that was possible. In the beginning, increasing difficulties had been met by arming the established police, and by drafting more troops into the country. The police of the cities took to carrying revolvers on duty; but these very arms were to prove a source of danger. One gun or ten guns were equally useless to a man standing up all day as a target. What use are arms to a man when any person in a crowd may step up to him and shoot him? The man who shoots first lives longest in this type of struggle.

The I.R.A. was, on the whole, systematic in its plan of aggression. It dealt with its avowed enemies and did not meddle with those who left it alone. It regarded such people as the Dublin Metropolitan Police as passive rather than active enemies, until the constables came on duty armed.

The police perceived their new danger and presently petitioned the authorities to relieve them of their arms, which petition was granted.

The city police did not show up in a courageous light; but undoubtedly their position was a difficult one. A certain sympathy for their own countrymen may have been at work; but in the main the negative attitude they adopted came from an appreciation of the British Government’s inability to protect them.

The situation during the winter of 1920-21 was a striking illustration of the manner in which a small organised body can intimidate a far larger disorganised body. The fear created in the country by this struggle below the surface was incredible; the boldest seemed numbed. A man might have been murdered in broad day in the Dublin streets, and not a policeman have lifted a finger. The uniformed men on point duty would have gone on waving the traffic this way and that.

The attitude of the police was reasonable. While they stayed neutral they were safe; as soon as they interfered they became marked men. And once they were marked men they stood up in the streets as a target until somebody stepped out of the crowd and shot them dead.

A similar spell had fallen upon the civilian population. Most people desired nothing better than to be let go about their business in peace. They might have loyalist sympathies, they might have Sinn Fein sympathies; they kept their sympathies to themselves and such friends as they were sure of.

And nobody was sure of anybody.

Thus it was the British Government could get no support in Ireland.

The following illustrates the condition of affairs.

A stone flew through a Dublin shop window, and the shopkeeper came running out and demanded what the stone thrower meant. The man retorted he had thrown the stone because he felt like it, that he was a Sinn Feiner, and he defied the shopkeeper to touch him. He demanded for his services a cigarette, which he was given. A policeman on point duty was close by, a crowd was looking on, and nobody moved in the matter. The shopkeeper returned to his shop. The stone thrower was unlikely to have been an Irish Volunteer, probably he was a hooligan; but the announcement was sufficient to place everybody under a spell.

As matters went from bad to worse the British Government found it necessary to supplement the troops in the country, and an auxiliary body of police was recruited to reinforce the country police, who were dotted about in isolated barracks. The recruits, many of whom were Irishmen and ex-service men, wore black uniforms and tan bandoliers and so earned the name of Black-and-Tans. They were armed with rifles, they rode in lorries, and they swept about the roads at breakneck speed.

In addition to the Black-and-Tans, the Government recruited a second auxiliary police force, which came to be known as the Auxiliary Cadets. The recruits were all ex-officers and wore a most dashing uniform, which culminated in a Balmoral bonnet perched at a jaunty angle. These people were also armed with rifles, and rode in lorries. They were more in evidence in the cities than the Black-and-Tans.

These reinforcements were to assist the search for active members of the I.R.A. and to raid suspected houses for arms and documents. But before you can arrest your man it is necessary to know his whereabouts and if he be guilty or not. This work could not be undertaken by such military and police forces as were in commission, and the British Government met the situation by extending the operations of the secret service. The Sinn Fein organisation was one gigantic secret service, and only another secret service could cope with it.

This strange situation of an immensely powerful man fighting the shadow of a man continued. Justice was ready with the prison and the hangman; but there was no murderer for the scaffold. But the secret service was bringing in all the time little bits of information—that Paddy Murphy was responsible for this, that Denny Burke had done that. It was useless to arrest Paddy or Denny as there was no concrete proof, for no witness would come forward because of intimidation or out of sympathy, and until the courts martial sat, should a man be brought to trial, no civil jury would convict for like reasons.

The police were scattered through the countryside in isolated barracks. In course of time these barracks were roughly fortified with barbed wire and sandbags. In the undisturbed districts as often as not the police found themselves cut off from social amenities through the villagers regarding them with suspicion and fearing to hold communication with them lest they fell under suspicion of being sympathisers and informers. The police waited month after month, never venturing far from barracks, in a state of siege by an invisible enemy.

In the disturbed areas the life of the Crown forces was unbearable. Not a man, woman, or child but had been taught to look on them with contempt and hatred. They found themselves picked off as opportunity availed, and they were powerless to say whose hand had pulled the trigger, though probably every villager knew, and knew the road the gunman had taken.

They were out in all weathers patrolling the roads and scouring the country for the phantom army, which never materialised, though it left frequent marks of its presence in trenches dug at the turn of roads, in trees felled across the path, and in walls torn down for an obstruction. Indeed, at any hour, at any favourable spot, it might materialise, round a sudden corner, over the shoulder of a hill, from some wooded height above the road. A volley of shots would pour down, and the gunmen would make away across country, of which they knew every inch of ground. The nerves of the police must have been stretched to the breaking point during those patrols, so that hate was breeding in them like maggots in meat.

The recognised policy of the I.R.A. was to harass the Government forces continuously; orders were issued to that effect, and in cases of isolated barracks it was the practice to fire occasional shots at the windows night after night with the idea of keeping the inmates on the qui vive for an attack, which was never to take place. Occasionally, if sufficient volunteers were in the neighbourhood, a barracks would be attacked, the attackers bringing with them the materials for setting the place on fire, and so forcing the garrison to capitulate. When it is borne in mind that the attackers frequently arrived in force, it is strange they met so seldom with success; but the hit and run policy must have been on the whole demoralising to the volunteers. I do not think, when their number and equipment are taken into account, any other policy could have been adopted, nor do I wish to suggest that the volunteers had a lesser share of courage than other men. They are part of the British nation, and many fine soldiers have come from Ireland. But when a soldier goes to battle in the belief that in nine chances out of ten he will come away without a scratch, in fact that all he will be asked to do will be to fire one or two shots and then away, he gets that sense of safety before all which is likely to be fatal to his daring.

The phantom enemy continued to fail to materialise; but little by little Government agents, swimming up and down in the sea of Sinn Fein, found out who were the responsible Republican leaders in their districts, captured documents gave further evidence, and the police came to know in time whether the butcher standing politely behind his counter was always a butcher; whether the baker gave up kneading bread on occasion and produced a gun from under the floor, and so on. They came to know whether the grocer held meetings at the back of his shop after the shutters were up.

Then one day some constable—in most cases a marked man who had been shifted from another part of the country—strolling through the village to buy a stick of tobacco, would get fired on by half a dozen men round a corner. The chances were the assassins belonged to another district, as it was a policy to send volunteers to work in a district where they were not known. The men who fired the shots were gone when the police arrived to their murdered comrade; but the butcher, the baker, and the grocer were behind their counters like worthy tradesmen. These very men, guiltless of this crime, had possibly done similar work in another neighbourhood; it was known they were members of the detested phantom army. The police, filled with hate, fear, and worn out with weeks of vigil, turned upon these people and their shops for their just revenge.

Up went the town.

These were the circumstances which brought about the reprisals.