CHAPTER XV
THE DISTRESSFUL COUNTRY
Late one evening I was returning home from a Fabian lecture when a tall, middle-aged man, with slightly wavy hair and a pair of merry blue eyes, accosted me. He carried under his arm a large and rather untidy brown-paper parcel, which looked as though it might contain groceries and gave him the appearance of the middle-class father of a family. His voice was soft and pleasant, his accent unmistakably Irish.
“Pardon me, madam, but are you an Irishwoman?” he asked interestedly.
“No,” I replied. “I was born in Yorkshire. But why do you ask?”
“Forgive me, but your voice carries a long way, and I could not help hearing a part of your conversation with the lady who left you at Hampstead. You were talking about Ireland. Your voice and the kind things you said about Ireland made me think you might be an Irishwoman.”
“No,” I said again; “I am not Irish, but I am going to Ireland to-morrow.”
“Ah!” he said, drawing a deep breath. “And why are you going to Ireland at a time like this? Surely not for pleasure?”
“No, indeed; there can be no pleasure in Ireland for anybody with a spark of human feeling. I am going to Ireland to try to discover the truth, if that is possible.”
“You are a newspaper woman, then?” was the next query. I made no further answer, feeling that the conversation with a perfect stranger, albeit a courteous and sympathetic one, had gone on long enough, when he began to speak with added warmth both of speech and manner.
“Ah! you English people, you do not understand, you never will understand Ireland. In your imagination you have peopled our island with devils and conceive it to be your duty to exterminate the plague. ‘The dirty Irish’ is the way you think about us. Hunting down Irishmen is by some Englishmen regarded as legitimate sport. I am a native of Cork. I am not a Sinn Feiner. I do not want to see Ireland cut loose from the Empire. And I deplore as much as anybody the murders on both sides. But I understand my countrymen. I doubt if you do. I very much doubt if you can. The differences are too great. But whosoever goes to Ireland without clearly realizing that the English and the Irish are two distinct and separate nations will fail to understand the things he sees and hears when he gets there. I am constantly hearing talk on this side about the possibility of Ireland making terms with Germany, becoming even a German province if she secures self-government.” Here his voice became louder and his manner more excited than ever; the newspaper he was holding dropped from his hand and fluttered away in the wind. “Surely if such people understood the racial differences between English and Irish they would realize that the same applies, though in a much greater degree, to the German and Irish?”
“Believe me,” I said, holding out my hand, “there are many people in this country who do understand and who labour continuously to create understanding in others. They yearn to bring about peace between the two countries. Between peoples who speak the same language war is a crime. I am going to Ireland to get more knowledge about her, to talk to her people directly. And when I return I shall join the band of workers for peace and reconciliation.”
He raised his hat, renewed his apologies for detaining me, and disappeared. Under the gas lamp I caught a glimpse of tears on his lashes—tears of a strong man for Ireland, his native land, a suffering thing he cannot help.
The Labour Party’s delegation to Ireland had not included a woman. Several members of the Women’s International League, and a few Quaker women on errands of mercy, had visited the country. This was some time before the Labour Party had decided upon an official visit. The secretary of the party had received from an Irishwoman a letter imploring him to include a woman amongst his investigators, but it was not thought wise to do this by the men on account of the danger and inconvenience. When one of the executive proposed my name as one of the delegates Mr. Henderson, with the most paternal solicitude, suggested that the Executive Committee ought not to take upon itself the responsibility of running any woman into such real danger as existed for travellers in general and investigators in particular in Ireland at that time. So the proposal fell to the ground.
No such objection was raised when the delegation to Russia was appointed. On the contrary, Mr. Henderson strongly pressed me to go to Russia. I cannot imagine that the concern of this genuinely kind-hearted man for the safety for his women colleagues was in abeyance on that occasion. Mr. Henderson had been to Russia and suffered considerable danger himself. I can only conclude that this serious-minded colleague of mine believed the danger to be greater in Ireland under British rule than in Russia under the rule of the Bolsheviks! I agreed to go to Russia with some reluctance on my own account. Not because of any fear of going. Atrocity stories and wild tales of epidemics had no terrors for me. But the time of the proposed Russian visit was inopportune. I had received invitations to go to Poland, Spain, and Hungary. Preparations for the journey to Madrid had already been made and had to be cancelled.
But there were no obstacles to the Irish visit. I wanted to go. Irishwomen wanted me to go. I received one pressing letter after another. The Labour Party’s objection was laughed to scorn. I must say the idea that women who have lived more summers than they care to confess cannot be allowed to take the responsibility for their own lives, but must be a burden and a charge, whether they like it or not, on the consciences of their men comrades is in these days vastly amusing; particularly to the women of the Labour Movement, whose conception of progress is of equality of effort, of danger, of suffering, and of reward for men and women.
None the less, I understood and valued at its very real worth the altogether gracious and kindly thought which lay at the root of the action of the Labour Executive.
It was impossible to resist the pleading of Irishwomen that as many women as could do so should go over there and see with their own eyes what the women and children of Ireland are called upon to endure.
On Saturday, January 15, 1921, I left Euston for Holyhead, alone, and without having in any way advertised my intention. I landed in Dublin in the evening and proceeded to friends in one of the suburbs. We drove from the station in a jaunting-car. In such a fashion did I get my first glimpse of Dublin under what the majority of Irishmen consider to be foreign occupation. Westland Row Station, as well as Kingstown Harbour, was full of soldiers and police. Passengers coming off the boat were heavily scrutinized. We were closely examined in the train. In the streets and public places of all sorts in every town I visited during the ten days of my visit, even in country villages and lanes, the atmosphere was tense with the expectation of the sudden assault, the quick firing of rifles, the rough arrest, the climbing of military lorries on to the footpaths, the humiliating search, the heart-breaking insult. Women and men alike feared these things. Here was an equality of treatment which nobody objected to so far as Irishwomen were concerned, least of all the Republican women themselves, who would think shame of themselves if they were unwilling to suffer what their men are called upon to endure. But the pity of it! Little children are often victims. Boys and girls have been shot dead.
On this night the streets of Dublin were lively with the clatter of armoured cars and lorry loads of singing soldiers not too sober. Occasionally a distant shot was heard. Now and then a side-car packed with merry little dare-devils flaunting their green flag provocatively for the sheer fun of the thing would rattle past. One trembled for the ignorant folly of madcap youth.
My host, who is one of the best-known and most highly respected citizens of Dublin, did everything in his power to bring me into touch with every shade of Irish opinion, so that I might judge of things for myself without bias or pressure from outside. I never was in any country where there were fewer attempts to make proselytes. He himself is a Quaker, and has a long record of devoted service to his country and to the less fortunate of his fellow-citizens to his credit, which inspired confidence and respect. His beautiful wife and lovely children gave me a warm Irish welcome, and, although an Englishwoman and, therefore, a justifiable object of suspicion, I was never permitted for a moment to feel myself an intruder.
From Saturday night till Tuesday morning the hours were packed with incident. I think it would have been difficult for anybody to see more people and hear more tales of woe than it was my lot to see and hear during these ten days in Ireland. Amongst my new acquaintances were Republicans of all sorts, Nationalist Home Rulers, Unionists, Labour Party officials, Trade Unionists, Quakers, humble citizens with no particular political affiliations, Catholic priests and Protestant ministers boys and girls from the country “on the run” in the city, newspaper men, writers of books and pamphlets, British officers, lawyers by the dozen, ex-soldiers, high-born ladies, the widows of men executed in the rebellion of 1916, suffragettes, women doctors, temperance folk, members of the Irish Republican Army, commercial travellers, and men and women suspected of being British agents and spies. I should like to disclose the names of all these interesting persons. In most cases I have full authority to do so. But when that permission is coupled with a declaration that they do not care two pins about the consequences to themselves, I am involved in too great a responsibility to be reckless in a matter where human life and liberty are so manifestly involved.
But because I believe even the present British Government, more profligate of its power than any Government of modern times in this country, would scarcely dare to mishandle a man so great in the esteem, not only of Ireland but of the whole world of culture, I feel I may write freely of that towering personality, Mr. G. W. Russell (“Æ”), whom I met several times in Dublin, always to my great spiritual profit.
Picture a face and figure not unlike those of William Morris in the prime of his life, with a tenderness joined to his strength which I imagine was less conspicuous in the English poet. Masses of wavy hair tossed back but occasionally falling over a fine square forehead, a full mouth, glorious eyes full of humour and gentleness, a soft musical voice; the frame of a Viking, the heart of a saint, the imagination of a poet, the vision of a prophet; a man to whom children would run with their troubles, whom women would trust unflinchingly, whom men would serve with utter loyalty; the embodiment of the real Ireland, the Ireland that is not known in England—this is the man whose devoted, lifelong work for the salvation of Ireland is being wantonly and savagely annihilated by British troops.
Mr. Russell spoke without a trace of bitterness, though I know he suffers keenly, when he told me of the destruction of Irish creameries and of the difficulties which co-operative enterprise is meeting with in every part of Ireland. He edits the Irish Homestead, and there he has voiced the complaints of Irish co-operators in language of the greatest beauty; but to hear him tell the story himself was a pleasure fraught with pain to his English auditor.
“It cannot be that the system of reprisals has become an integral part of the British nation’s scheme of justice?” he asked, as we sat talking by the fire in the house of a friend. “It would be too terrible to think that that were true.”
“The British people do not know all that is happening here,” I replied. “Oh, I know they ought to. Enough has been said and written about it. The ignorance of affairs outside the little circle of their own interests of the average man and woman makes me almost despair of democracy at times. But there is this explanation of the inactivity of the British public about Irish matters. In the first place, very many people know nothing. Those who do read that part of their daily paper which is not devoted to the sporting news or the Divorce Court proceedings read a partial tale. The news is generally coloured in favour of Dublin Castle and the Black and Tans. I cannot believe that British co-operators would be content to tolerate the things which are being done to Irish co-operative enterprises if they knew the facts.”
I was given a tiny yellow book containing the facts which I promised to help circulate in England. It is an amazing story. The statements would have appeared incredible to me had I not seen with my own eyes the blackened walls and twisted machinery of the gutted creameries in several parts of Ireland. Forty-two attacks by the Crown forces on these village and country town institutions had been made up to the time of my conversation with “Æ.” In these attacks the factories were burned down, the machinery destroyed, the stores looted, the employés beaten and sometimes wounded and killed.
Questioned in Parliament, the Government has excused itself by declaring that the creameries were centres of propaganda and of Sinn Fein activity. They alleged that in two cases shots were fired at the troops from the buildings. The most searching inquiries by responsible people, including Sir Horace Plunkett, failed to produce any evidence in support of the charges of the Government. But Mr. Russell is not concerned about the result of these inquiries. He wants a Government inquiry into the whole of the circumstances connected with this particularly lamentable form of reprisal, and this inquiry is steadily denied. Why?
Travellers in Ireland to-day see all over the country these new ruins, centres of village industry and culture utterly wrecked, and the peasant farmers and their families driven back to their lonely farms to live in poverty and isolation; driven back to feed not only upon their own scant produce but upon the black passions of hate and individualism from which the co-operative idea had begun so successfully to rescue them.
“Surely the English workmen begin to realize the connexion between our problem and theirs,” said another distinguished co-operator. “If our economic life continues to be so seriously disturbed, or if it be destroyed, we cannot buy from England as we have been doing. Do you know that, with the single exception of India, Ireland is the best customer that England possesses within the British Empire?” The political views of this cultured gentleman are distinctly non-Republican, yet his house is not safe from the official intruder, and he is tormented hourly with the sense of outrage and injustice which the destruction of his life’s labours must necessarily produce.
“To us it would be simply unbelievable but for the other follies we have seen perpetrated by your statesmen, that any Government with the least knowledge of the world-situation could willingly add to its dangers and difficulties. Yet I cannot believe that the members of the British Government are all ignorant and stupid.” This third speaker was a man who had served with distinction in the British Army during the war. But the droop of his figure, the gloom in his eye, the bitter curl of his lips—everything about him spoke of a confidence lost and a faith killed.
“Two millions of adult people in Great Britain either wholly or partially unemployed; wives and children beginning to hunger; industrial strife on a scale hitherto unimagined clouding the horizon; men by the million trained to kill, ready to be used by one side or the other in a class war; hate and violence the fruit of it all, and appalling suffering for all classes before one side recognizes the right of the workers to an assured and abundant life and the other side realizes that Russia’s way is not the way even for Russia. All this and more—and yet the British Government actually or tacitly encourages the troops to add Irish tens of thousands to the British millions of workless, starving, hating men and women, and is slowly but surely converting the only revolution in history which makes a point of preserving the rights of private property into something which will be akin to a class war for a Communist republic—an issue which I should deeply deplore.”
I am bound to confess that I discovered no substantial evidence that the civil war in Ireland has either a Communist basis or a Communist ideal. The utter conservatism of the Irish is the most striking thing about them. Their determination to win self-government is based almost entirely upon that conservatism, the love of the Ireland of history, the passion for the Irish tongue, the devotion to the ancient faith, their love of the soil—these things and the memory of a thousand wrongs put upon them by the alien conqueror have much more to do with Irish discontent than any desire to hold the land in common and convert the industries from private to public ownership and control; which ideas would, indeed, be repugnant to the last degree to the peasant owners of the South and West of Ireland.
Speaking on this point with some of the workingmen leaders I asked how far, in their opinion, the Communist propaganda had captured the Irish workers. “Scarcely at all,” was the quick reply. “There was fearful anger over the cruel death of Connolly. His execution did a great deal to unite the Labour Movement in Ireland with the Republican Party. It was the sheer brutality of it. The poor fellow hadn’t more than forty-eight hours to live. He had been shot in the scrimmage in Dublin, and gangrene had set in. Yet they dragged him out of his bed groaning with pain, put him on a chair and shot him—the brutes! They think it’s all in the day’s work to shoot a ‘dirty Irishman.’ But our people will never forget Connolly and the way he died. No; the Irish workers are not Communists. They just hate England and want to be quit of her.
“Ay, and there’s the case of Kevin Barry while you’re on about the killing. Do you know they tortured that poor lad to get him to tell the names of his comrades? We have his affidavit. They bruised his flesh and twisted his limbs and then they hanged him—hanged him, mind you, when the poor lad begged that he might be shot as a prisoner of war! Your Prime Minister calls it war when he wants to excuse the murders of his own hired assassins. But if so, our men are prisoners of war when they are captured. Who ever heard of a civilized nation hanging prisoners of war? But praise be to God, every time you hang a boy like Kevin Barry you make hundreds of soldiers for the Republican Army. Eighteen hundred men in Dublin joined up the day Kevin was hanged.”
The little man who thus broke in began to fill with tobacco the bowl of his small black pipe, and when he had lit it he turned on me, fiercely demanding: “Why have you come to Ireland now? Why didn’t you come before? Why don’t more of you come? How many thousands of our brave boys have got to be killed before you folks find out what your bloody troops are doing to Irish men, women, and children?” And he flung himself out of the room.
I felt sorry to have appeared indifferent for so long, and said so to the rest of the assembled company. “But to tell you the truth, I have lived all these years under the impression that Irish men and women preferred to win their own battles in their own way; that they regarded rather as an intrusion any effort of English people to help and advise them. From the first hour of my political life I have been a supporter of self-government for Ireland; but I never dreamt that you wanted me, or any of the rest of us, to come to Ireland to say so. I believed that you wanted to work out your own salvation.”
“So far as advice is concerned you were right,” said a young fellow with a large freckled face and fine eyes. “I reckon the English can’t teach us much about politics.”
“I’m not so sure,” I said very softly. “After all, you have not got what you have been fighting for during more than a hundred years, and you have not got rid of the oppression that has tormented you for several hundreds of years. Perhaps it is possible that co-operation might have done it. We can all teach each other something. Ireland has glorious lessons for us English. Perhaps you could have learnt a little of something from us.”
There was a long pause, and I continued: “It is of the first importance to carry the plain matter-of-fact people of England with you. Ordinary men and women in England have a strong sense of justice, but their imagination is weak. They find it difficult to understand what they do not endure themselves. They find it hard to believe in the wounds unless they can lay their fingers on the prints. You must admit that some of the things which are happening in Ireland are almost incredible. One thing which makes it difficult to open and keep open the minds of English people on the subject of Ireland’s wrongs is what they regard as Ireland’s wrongdoing, the killing of soldiers and police. Of course, a certain section of the newspaper press exploits this to the last degree. Why do you do it? Why use the methods so hateful in the others? Why put an argument in the mouths of the enemy? Why soil and stain a good cause?”
“Because we are at war,” was the prompt reply. “You have just heard that your Prime Minister says so. He justifies the methods of the Government because it is war. We do not like killing people; but can we be expected to sit quietly whilst our own men and women are killed and their property looted? It isn’t in human nature. Would Englishmen sit quiet under such provocation? We don’t like it. And, remember, we don’t kill innocent people like the other side. Every person executed by the Irish—executed, mark you, not murdered—is tried by the Republican Courts and found guilty on substantial evidence of traitorous conduct or brutal murder.” He folded up the copy of the Irish Bulletin he had been reading, and then proceeded: “I’m glad you came over. I wish others would come. I’m sure you’ll help Ireland. Tell your people that if it’s war they want, war they will get till every young man in Ireland is dead. Then they can begin with the old men and the women—they’ve begun with the women—and after that they’ll have to wait till the children grow up. But they’ll find them every bit as keen as their fathers. It’s in the blood of us. There are only two ways to peace, and God knows we want peace. You can either give Ireland her freedom, or you can sink the whole country in the sea. It’s the peace of the dead you’ll get if you won’t have that of the living.”
It is only fair to say that nine out of every ten of the Republicans to whom I spoke expressed sorrow and regret that the policy of violence had been adopted instead of that of passive resistance.
“But now that the fighting has been begun it is very difficult to stop it without laying ourselves open to the charge that we are weakening, or without giving the British Government the opportunity of saying that its policy of reprisals has succeeded. The very thought of these things is hateful to the sons and daughters of a brave fighting race.” The distinguished old lady who said this drew herself up as she spoke with the dignity of a queen and flashed swords and daggers from her fine proud eyes.
Her house had been searched twice by Crown forces. They did some small damage to doors and windows, nothing serious, for she is a woman of property and social position, an outstanding example of the thing I found to be true, that the severity of the reprisals, the ruthlessness of the visitations, the length and discomforts of the imprisonments were generally in proportion to the means or in accordance with the religious beliefs of the suspects. Age and sex did not count.
During an official reprisal which I witnessed in Cork, the blowing-up of two excellent shops in one of the main thoroughfares, when armed troops kept the crowd moving, and armoured cars, fully manned, kept the roads, I heard an old woman tremblingly ask a good-natured Tommy carelessly swinging his rifle as he moved people along the pavement, what the matter was. “We’re only going to send all you bloody Catholics to hell,” was the cheerful reply.
To refer once more to the searchings of private houses and shops: I investigated three cases, the one to which I have referred, the house of the old lady and her secretary, and two others, both shops. The usual practice is to knock loudly and demand admittance, but to give no time for anyone to run to the door, which is frequently burst open. Sometimes shots are fired into the passage as a precaution, killing or wounding perchance the man who is descending the stairs to answer the summons, which often comes in the middle of the night. A soldier stands guard over each member of the family. If the house be big enough each is placed in a separate room. If it be small they are turned into the streets and guarded there. A rigorous search is made, beds stripped, mattresses sometimes bayoneted, drawers opened and their contents tossed out, pictures pulled off the walls, letters opened and read, cupboards emptied—the whole house turned topsy-turvy. A shop is usually looted of half its contents. Recently, in the attempt to restore discipline, the householder has been requested to sign a paper stating that the soldiers left all in order and stole nothing. But no opportunity of checking is allowed, and the dazed and frightened woman (it is generally a woman, for the men are “on the run”) signs quickly, and would sign anything to get the soldiers and police out of the house and her terrified children into their beds.
In the case of the little sweet and tobacco shop the whole family, including two young children and an old woman, were turned into the street at midnight and made to stand there in the pouring rain for two hours. The gentle young Irish mother with the soft voice and seductive Irish drawl told me the story.
“It was me brother they wanted. He’s in the arrmy. But it’s weeks since Oi saw the face av him. Oi couldn’t tell thim where he was, but they wouldn’t belave me. It nearly broke me heart to see thim poke thurr bayonets thru the pickshure av the Blessed Virgin. An’ all the swates was trampled on the flure. The bits av tobaccy wint into the pockets av the crathurs. An’ the pore children was gittin’ thurr deaths av cold in the rain outside. An’ now the pore lambs will nut slape widout a light over thurr beds in the noight furr the fear av the cruel men that is on them. An’ what have Oi done but keep moi house an’ pay moi way like an honest woman? Shure,” she said, with a droll look and a twinkle, “if Oi knew whurr moi brother was, would Oi be tellin’ the soldiers? Oi would not, indade. Wolfe Tone is the name av him. An’ wouldn’t they be afther shootin’ at sight a man wid a name loike that?”
The Irish sense of humour never forsakes them even in their deepest distress. Mrs. A. Stopford Green, the widow of the great historian and herself an historian of merit, told me of a Catholic priest who had his home invaded and sacked. Standing amongst the wreckage of his little home, he exclaimed, between tears and smiles: “Glory be to God! They’ve taken everything they could lay their hands on. But there’s one thing they haven’t taken, because they can’t take it, and that is—the laugh!”
I came to one house in order to have an interview with a young Irish patriot who is “on the run.” He came secretly and at great risk to himself. He was cheerful and jolly; but, like everybody else in Ireland, he showed clear signs of strain and of an imminent breakdown. Eight times his premises had been searched, and each time valuable things had been stolen. Even whilst we talked a telegram from a friend arrived to say that the night before they had raided him again and taken away a pair of much-prized army boots.
A splendid type of cultivated and idealistic young manhood, he was hunted hourly from pillar to post on suspicion of ill-doing; but his life’s work had been humanitarian, designed by the slow but sure methods of education and co-operation to win the suspicious and illiterate peasant from his bondage to ignorance and intolerance.
He had been tried once and acquitted. He and his friend had been lodged in the guard-room. There was a struggle, and bombs, and the dead and mutilated body of his friend was carried out. The story was set about that the two of them had thrown the bombs at the troops. The bombs were lying loose in the guard-room. Nobody believed a story so thin. The pacific reputation of the two men was well known. Everybody asked why live bombs were left lying about in such a place. Were they put there to furnish an excuse for premeditated crime? Some believed this. Nothing is clear. In the subsequent inquiry before a Military Court composed of young and ignorant officers with a natural prepossession in favour of their profession and caste, it was denied that Clun’s body was mutilated. But a reliable witness told me that he had counted thirteen bayonet wounds.
The first thing which impressed me about the Sinn Feiners I met was their culture, then their courage, finally their spirituality. I speak now of those I met in the city—probably two hundred. Many of them would have been shot at sight if they had been seen coming out of their hiding-places to meet me. At the moment of writing more than one of those with whom I talked lies in a dark and dismal prison cell, notably Desmond Fitzgerald, head of the Republican Propaganda Department.
What amazed me continually was the entire absence of bitterness in the speech of most of these people. Bitterness they must have felt, and yet so sure are they of the goodness of their cause and of its ultimate triumph, that they can talk with calmness and even humour of the tragic events of which so many of them are the central figures.
“They say in England that this is first and foremost and all the time a religious quarrel; that the domination of Irish politics by the Pope is to be greatly feared if Ireland gets self-government. What have you to say to that?” I asked the handsome youth whose effective propaganda has filtered through to every country in Europe. It is one of the important facts of the present situation that the conduct of England towards Ireland is breeding a cynical contempt for England throughout the world.
“I have to say of the first statement that it is not true, and of the question that the fear is groundless. The Irish priests have tried in vain to stop the ambush. They have denounced it from their pulpits. But they have protested in vain. This defiance is the symbol of a conviction that the place of the priest is at the altar. When he leaves that to meddle with matters which are not his concern, he is thrust aside. I am myself a devout Catholic. But I would not tolerate for a moment the interference of the priest with my politics. Young Ireland will not. Our movement is spiritual, deeply spiritual. But with the methods by which we shall, under God, win this battle with our foes neither priest nor pacifist must interfere.”
Subsequent experience confirmed the impression that this is true; that the power of the priest in politics, if it ever seriously existed in Ireland, is rapidly on the wane. True also I found was the loathing of the priests for murder. I talked with several in different parts of the country. “Murder is murder by whomsoever committed,” was the invariable comment on the killing by both sides.