Passing from bad to worse, the year drew to an end.

As if the fury of those days were breeding them and putting them upon the streets, the shaking lorries increased in number; and the flying Crossley tenders swept by in the hunt—hunting, hunting, hunting for the elusive foe, which was everywhere and nowhere—which was on the pavements, which was behind the counters of the shops, which was wrapped in the uniforms of tram conductor, of railway porter, of postman, which made use of any refuge that it might help the infant Republic to take a place among the nations.

Terrible tales were whispered in those final weeks of the dying year. Tales of frenzied men hunted by bloodhounds. Tales of pitiless ambushes, of police slaughtered to a man, and the bodies hacked to pieces with axes. Tales of savage reprisal following on shameful deed, of burned shops, of deserted farms, of peasants gone to couch with fox and hare. Tales of new proclamations and new restrictions falling alike on guilty and innocent.

Tales of bridges destroyed in the country places to impede the movement of Government troops, and other bridges leading to the market towns blown up as reprisal by forces of the Crown. Tales of gross murder of isolated police replied to by tales of blindfolded prisoners taken at dead of night to lonely places and there told they were to die, made to kneel praying and listen while a grave was dug, and this play-acting done, the victim promised life if he would say was his neighbour, the butcher, a peaceful citizen or a follower of Sinn Fein, did his friend, the bootmaker, who so amiably dusted his shop of a morning also in the dark of night dust a gun which came up from under the boards. And could the kneeling man rise to meet this fierce hour and refuse the information, his thwarted captors returned him to his cell.

Tales that the golden age of robbery had come. Criminals in all countries hear of the anarchy abroad and take tickets to the distressed country. Armed men emerge from the lanes and the alley ways and rob by night and by day. It is whispered some of the robberies of the Ulster banks are carried out by Irish Volunteers acting under orders, it is shouted that some of the highway robberies are conducted by out-at-elbow Black-and-Tans, acting without orders and trying to turn an honest penny in an unfriendly land.

Then, in the midst of war, rumours of peace. The dove flutters a moment into sight, and takes wing again. Father O’Flanagan, Acting President of the Irish Republic, telegraphs to the British Prime Minister:—

The telegram was sent when Sinn Fein was hard pressed. Many of the leaders were in prison, the rest were hunted day and night. It was imperative to keep a tight hold on supporters if the movement were to hold together. A sudden gesture of this kind might be taken as a sign of panic and begin a general rout. There was a day or two of heart-searching in the Republican camp, and ‘Watchman,’ in one of the Nationalist journals, came forward with the warning that if the nation was not to be stampeded it must remain as cold as ice, calm as a summer lake, and wary as a fox going on all its toes. The mysterious Michael Collins emerged from his obscurity with a second letter in which he thanked nobody for refraining from murdering him, and told the nation to “stop talking, and get on with the work.”

The dove clapped its wings and fled away, and ere the sound of its flight was lost news came that as reprisal for an ambush in the public thoroughfare, the City of Cork was in flames. The machinery of war was in motion again.

Deed of terror following deed of terror, the days wore out, Christmas came and went, and the year came to an end.

Hampered but still free, fettered but not completely bound, finding the draught of difficulty as a sick man finds a strengthening medicine, through all that came and went, Sinn Fein continued with the building up of the Republic. Republican Courts, which had been suppressed, continued in existence, sitting when and where they could, judges, lawyers, plaintiffs, defendants, and all the following of law, flitting from place to place like birds bereft of a nesting ground, against all legal tradition taught to be sparing of argument, as at the very moment of judgment, they might have to snatch up bag and baggage, and judge, lawyer, plaintiff, and defendant make tracks to the hills. Yet in the face of opposition, because of it, these courts met with considerable success. Clients arrived in the hope that the judgments given would be more lenient than in the established British Courts, clients came from patriotic motives, from motives of adventure, and not least because they dared not stay away. Intimidation was present here as elsewhere.

For both parties in the struggle had great belief in the weapon of intimidation, and there was taking place one long competition in intimidation between the Crown Forces and the Republican Volunteers. The strange situation had arisen of two Governments claiming to rule the country, and neither one able to protect its adherents from the other, nor able to control its own extremists.

The inner circle of Sinn Fein held council when it could, framed its policy and issued its edicts. Cabinet Ministers might sleep each night in a new bed, those of them who were not sleeping night after night in one of his Britannic Majesty’s prisons; but their words were not without weight. In their offices in attics and in cellars, they built up the infant Republic.

It was told that the Minister of Finance found time to acknowledge all funds, although the very rumour of his name sent the gates of Dublin Castle back upon their hinges and a host of armed men abroad. Again and again his offices were captured, and his very signature found damp upon some cheque, yet with the choicest of his correspondence he was gone to some new attic, to some new cellar, there to begin again.

The Minister of Commerce, passing from place to place like any Ishmaelite, issued his edicts that such and such British goods should be boycotted, and the unwilling shopkeepers dared not disobey.

The Minister of Propaganda, pedalling, pedalling his ubiquitous bicycle, interviewed foreign journalists, got together his facts for the day’s issue of the Irish Bulletin, all the while thanking the dark for its cloak, thanking the cold for an excuse to muffle up.

So the work of the Departments was done, nor was it probable that it would be undone, for man thrives on difficulty. The danger to this national awakening was not then, it was going to be later on in the easy days of peace.

The old year came to an end, and the first day of the new year brought Sinn Fein Ireland a happy augury. It went from mouth to mouth that President De Valera had returned from America. Everywhere the question was put, “Is he come?” “Where has he landed?”

47, whom I ran across about this time, told me he received reliable information of the President’s whereabouts within a few hours of the landing, and he had passed on the news to Headquarters. It was decided that no steps should be taken to arrest the President, and henceforward to the truce in June, the difficulty for the agents of the Crown was to avoid coming in contact with him.

This was not the story told by Sinn Fein, who made it known that the astute President, aided by the Republican secret service, was making ridiculous the clumsy efforts of the Crown Forces to capture him, and patriots chuckled over their teacups. The awakening was a rude one. Auxiliary police, raiding the grounds of a house in the Blackrock district, found digging potatoes a mysterious person with side whiskers, who was possessed of important papers. He was escorted to the nearest barracks, where it transpired he was no less a man than the President of the Irish Republic. He received an apology and was released.

The patriots of the teatables were thunderstruck, and more insulted than if their President had been maltreated. Some there were who received a shock from which they never recovered.

It was in these dark days my wife and I first made acquaintance with A. E., first saw presiding over a circle interested in mysticism and the occult this benevolent and rather giant person, wrapped up in an ancient greatcoat, and all crowded into a chair. There was not a wrinkle to speak of in his face, as if a serene mind had allowed him to pass trouble by, and through his spectacles looked out eyes as blue as the sky.

On the wall were two pictures by his hand of visions he had seen in some uncommon hour. For this man, who is gaining an international reputation, was many-sided, and each side exceeded the stature of an average man.

He was a painter of some ability, and better than his painting was his poetry, and better than his poetry was his prose, and better than his prose were his ideas; and more astonishing than his ideas was the facility for expressing them. He seemed informed on half the subjects in the world, and a question would start the stream of eloquence flowing. Never was there such an example of rich payment received from trained concentration and years of clear thinking.

The new year started as the old year had ended in fury and ruin.

One of the dreariest of those afternoons, when evening was sweeping up out of the Liffey in the guise of a river fog, I found myself upon O’Connell Bridge watching a line of soldiers holding up traffic and searching motor cars. Standing there as chilly of thought as I was chilly of body, I became intuitive like a prophet, so that I was ready to open my mouth and prophesy.

Militant Sinn Fein had reached the limit of its popularity with the nation, the swing of the pendulum had got to its end and would come back again. It had been a melancholy task for loyal people watching the Republican ideal spreading through the country like a disease, finding week by week the British Empire losing the Irish nation, first by tens, then by hundreds, then by thousands, and for this reason above others, that Irishmen—be their opinions wrong, be their deeds wrong—were being hunted down in Ireland. The case of the deserting Unionists was the case of the man who is willing to beat his own wife, but who takes her part when an outsider appears to do the business.

Waiting on the bridge this evening, watching the fog rise off the river and the soldiers search the cars as they drove up, I knew the Sinn Fein militant policy had reached the limit of national sympathy and patience. As restrictions grew worse, as trade grew worse, that numerically greatest portion of the population to whom ideals are a consideration secondary to material prosperity, would look more and more askance at the people who were bringing them to ruin.

The Republican cry was a false cry as far as the Irish nation was concerned. Only a minority of the people were genuine in a desire for the Republic, and many who shouted “Up the Republic” had no idea what they meant. A band of enthusiasts had struck a spark, and now the country was wrapped in the flames of a national passion; but the majority of the people had been caught in the conflagration through circumstance. The psychology of the crowd had operated, the spirit of the herd.

Now that the youth of Ireland, who had been cheated of the European war, had had a fill of struggle, the time was at hand when the wise fireman, dragging his hose after him, might get into position to put the fire out.

Ireland suffered under a genuine grievance. The taxation was unjust; there were other injustices. But if a truce could be called and an offer made which put right what had before been wrong, the dream of a Republic would pass away as a man’s dream passes away in the morning. Let the tension be slackened and life find its true values again, and all the shouts left in the throats of the true Republicans would not trouble the nation again. The effort had been used up, and the gods do not give such passion twice in a generation. They are chary of their gifts.

Thinking this, I waited on the bridge, wondering how long would go by before some one in the crowd fired at the soldiers, whereupon the soldiers would return the compliment, and there would follow a stampede, and I would be offered the choice of being shot to death or crushed to death. But nobody drew a gun on this occasion, though another time, very soon afterwards, I was on the same spot, and somebody in the crowd threw a bomb or fired a shot, somebody who was well down a side street a moment afterwards, and the soldiers fired into the brown as I expected, and a woman was killed.

But the dove of peace, which had fluttered into sight for a day or two before Christmas, had fled away, and was not yet to be seen back again, and during these first weeks of the new year it became evident that spirit was to descend yet farther into matter.

I take the following quotations haphazard from issues of the Irish Bulletin (the Republican organ) of that date. Such remedies as these were tried to cope with the situation.

From the Irish Independent of January 1st.

Independent of January 4th.

Tragic to read? Yes. Regrettable to read? Yes. But the Crown Forces were victims of circumstances no less than were the Irish Volunteers. The trouble began by Britain refusing to concede certain Irish claims; this led to outrage, and outrage to reprisals, and reprisals to a state of civil war. The reprisals were carried out to intimidate (and to a certain extent the reprisals did justify themselves), to satisfy thwarted effort, out of contempt. I have spoken to several Auxiliary Police, humane men, men who had taken part in the European War, and not one of them spoke of the Sinn Feiner as an enemy and an equal, as he might have spoken of a Frenchman or a German. If it were suggested the reprisals were unworthy, the answer would be, “Good enough for them, the swine!”

Yet the Irish Volunteer believed himself to be serving an ideal. I quote an extract from General Lawson’s report, dated December 30th.

The Irish Volunteers, lacking numbers and equipment, were forced to conduct the fight by any method they could, and the Crown Forces, if they were to get in a blow at all, had frequently to get down on hands and knees, and meet the enemy on their own level. Such are the humours of life.

Surely the gods must laugh as they watch, or, indeed, are they wiser than man believes, and order these complex events that he, weary of reading from the old lesson book, may have his attention caught by old truths put in a new way, and learn again the lessons of fortitude and restraint.

January came to an end, February came to an end, and the disastrous tale of deeds continued; but the days were getting longer, and the cold was going out of the air, and a man felt when the sun came back again, peace also might return.