We did at last seem to be putting the winter behind, and like divers in a sea, to be coming out of darkness and cold. Spring did seem to be arriving. The sun shone, the days lengthened, and the leaves began to poke out of the barren boughs of the lilacs and the hawthorns across the way. One could not do other than grow cheerful with the carolling birds. And surely the Republican Volunteers lying out on the mountains, and surely the police driving up hill and down hill, found time to do as we other men were doing?

These Volunteers lying in ambush, drunk with patriotism and hate, must have been aware of the high blue sky, of the bright white clouds; they must have raised their eyes now and then from the turn of the road round which their prey was to come, to watch the birds wildly wheeling; they must have felt the strong grass pushing up.

And the police driving, driving, driving, furious and foiled, seeking, seeking, seeking their invisible enemy, above the throb of the engines must have heard a little of the singing in the hedges, through the reek of petrol must have drawn in a little of the bouquet of the flowers.

With spring came rumours of a change in policy. It went from mouth to mouth that the British Cabinet was debating a definite peace offer, which would prove acceptable to the Republicans, or as an alternative, the making of real war.

Could Britain survive the humiliation of a truce? Yes. Her very might permitted her to take this step. Her strength was so overwhelming, and so plainly had never been exerted to any extent, that she could make an offer of peace without mortal injury to her prestige. There were no doubt Republican Volunteers, men who had never had a taste of real war, the war of heavy rifle fire and shell fire, who believed the Republican Army the equal of the British Army in the open field; but these men could not be many.

The rumour came and went, and came again.

Rumour brought other news besides talk of peace. The return of the sun had laid the bogey of the long winter nights; but winter had left a mark upon a good many people. Rumour said the men on the run were at the end of their tether. The barber to Michael Collins reported that the Minister of Finance jumped out of his skin at any sound. The barber experienced a good deal of difficulty shaving the Minister. Possibly the said Minister used a safety razor; but the whisper was a sign of the times.

“What I notice most about our boys is the way they have aged,” Mrs. Desmond Fitzgerald said to me. “Some of them, who were quite young men at the Rising four years ago, walk and talk like middle-aged men.”

I asked Mrs. Fitzgerald how the leaders with a price on their heads kept their nerve day after day, and her answer was they had no time to think of danger because of the work to get through. These people slept in a different house most nights of the week; but all arrangements were made for them, and when they laid down to sleep, be it by night or by day, they knew those round them put their safety first of all things. They knew they were the chosen of a nation, which had lifted them out of obscurity in a few brief years, and this must have been a stout prop to their courage. Nevertheless, I have been assured the life told on the stoutest, for in this warfare, carried on below the surface, it was in the most secure moment a man found himself destroyed.

So spring brought rumours of peace, but did not bring peace. Attacks upon the Crown Forces had increased, and though the Republican Volunteers had returned to their old ambushing tactics, having found the open skirmishing too costly, they carried out daring coups now and then, which helped to restore the damage to their reputation caused by their tactics in the cities.

Then one day I met a neighbour who told me her greengrocer, one of the I.R.A., had announced that the six weeks to follow were to be the worst weeks of the struggle. Lo! anything might happen to anybody at any moment, and the most obscure citizen might find all in an instant that though the age of chivalry might be dead, the age of romance still existed.

One sunny day, when the wind was shaking open the lilacs across the way, a thin stream of smoke curled up into the sky over the river, and the word went round that the Customs House, the most beautiful building in Ireland, was in flames.

I turned my steps that way. The wind was high, and there was little hope for the building. I came in good time to the shabby streets, which have an end upon the quays. The stream of smoke was rolling up, filling all one part of the sky. I judged the building must be in its death throes. At last, through a gap in the streets, I saw the Customs House straight before me on the other side of the river, and on the quays on this side all the world had gathered. When I emerged from my dive into the mean streets, I came against a wedge of several thousand people. They were from all parts of the city; but swallowing up all the others were the denizens of this slum quarter.

There were women with babies, women without babies, and women who might have had babies with them had the Volunteers delayed their operations for a few weeks. There were urchins with boots and urchins without boots, and half-grown people in their fathers’ coats, and other half-grown people in their mothers’ skirts, and children who would grow up into touts, and other children who would grow up into beggar-women and flower-girls.

And here and there, like islands in a sea, were prosperous citizens; high and low all brought to a single level by their curiosity. And, of course, there were Republican Volunteers in the crowd, and perhaps agents of the British secret service.

To the man who could bide his time the crowd presented a gap here and a gap there, and I slipped into this place and slipped into that place, and presently had a front row view of what was going forward. The Liffey held us in check. It was a high tide, and the wind sent the wave-tops into the air in spray. A quay was on the farther side, and rising beyond, the lovely building of the Customs House, that morning doomed to death and now in the agony.

“Sure, and it’s the clock is still going, God save us,” said a lady on my left, drawing a shawl round her infant’s face, and giving it a jerk to send it into dreamland.

“And Lady Liberty standing up there so brave, it’s her we must see come down,” answered her crony.

“Indade, and I hear tell it’s Lady Hope up there,” retorted she of the baby.

I looked up at the statue of Commerce, which crowned the dome of the building. It seemed the final prize to which all the flames were leaping.

There was a great to-do going on on the farther side, but the building was large, and the space before it ample. The place was picketed by military, and every now and then some Government motor would dash up or roll away, bringing or carrying off military officials, police officials, and less glorious officials in mufti.

Upon the face of the building firemen were at work, pigmy people of no consequence beside the statue, who nevertheless seemed to be making a last stand like warriors driven to the corners of their country.

For the wind blew steadily, and every now and then sprang upon the great stone building in a squall, and the tops of the waves which held us where we were, would fly off in spray. And the fiery heart of the building would glow and redden and become fiercer, and the firemen would doubly toil at the hose, which looked like the dead body of some great sea-serpent lately come out of the river. Their backs would bend, and it would come after them ever so unwillingly. And other firemen, creeping about the grey face of the building upon their ladders, would peer at the molten heart through some gaping window, and direct tons of water within.

And then the wind would sigh and fall again, and the water roaring down upon some outwork of the conflagration would batter it to death; and a new wind springing up would blow like a giant’s bellows upon the quenched sparks, blow a new fury of destruction into them, and they would leap up again.

“Och, it’s a grander sight than the Post Office in Easter week.”

“It is, it is.”

Moving to and fro upon Butt Bridge, and moving up and down the quays, were Crossley tenders with their load of police. Now and then a gust of rage would seize those people, as indeed rage was consuming all Ireland now, the tender would awaken to a new pace and come running in the direction of the crowd, and a panic like a live thing, would seize us; we would start running and bunch up into the alleyways. The car would roll down to where we had been, and the men would lean over its armoured sides, shaking their guns and grinding their teeth, as if their dumb lips were shouting for the phantom enemy to come out of the crowd and give them battle. The car would back and turn, and roll up the quay towards the bridge again, and we would come out from our holes like rats.

“Indade, and it’s shooting ye they would be if ye was to look at them,” said a stout lady in a shawl, gazing up the quay after the departed enemy.

“It’s grand they look in them hats,” said her daughter of twenty, who had enjoyed the scuttle into covert, and was wiping her nose on her finger.

“And it’s meself,” agreed the mother, “will be sad to see the last iv the military, thieves and murderers as they are. It’s a grand sight is the military.”

“Sure, and it’s our boys are going to show them the way out iv the country. And it’s a grand sight our boys will look in green.”

“They will. Them Auxiliaries be good fighters. I hear tell this morning they got out iv their motors and stood up there, and banged away with their legs apart and their rifles to their shoulders. I hear tell there was a girl standing by, and one iv them Auxiliaries, sez he to she, ‘Lie ye down, mum, or it’s shot ye’ll be,’ and he puts her on the ground, and his foot in the stomach iv her for to protect her, and he goes on shooting, and its not a minute after he falls dead atop iv her with a bullet to the heart.”

At the end of one of these panics, when the police had retreated up the quay and we had emerged into the open, I found myself in a new place. I started to gape across the river again just as somebody beside me said, “How’s the world treating you?” I found 47 at my elbow.

“Hallo,” I said.

“Hallo,” he answered.

“Where have you sprung from?”

“I came along to see what was doing.”

“They’ve made a good job of it?” I suggested, nodding over the river.

“They have,” he admitted. “About their best stunt up to date.”

“Did you hear how they did it?” I asked.

“They arrived this morning in covered lorries, and brought the straw and paraffin with them. I hear our people”—he dropped his voice as he said our people—“have got over a hundred prisoners at the Castle, so I don’t know how many there were on the job at the start. The Shinners took the Customs House people by surprise, and, of course, there was nobody armed to put up any resistance. They dismantled the telephones, herded up the clerks into one part of the place, chucked paraffin and straw all over the place, and set everything alight. They had taken the precaution to send men to hold up the firemen at the two nearest fire-stations. The coup was well planned, and they would probably have got away scot free; but there’s a story that some pickets standing on the bridge saw a tender of Auxiliaries coming along, got nervous, thought they were discovered, fired on them, and that gave the show away. In two minutes our fellows were pouring out of the Castle, and in five minutes the place was surrounded. I understand the Shinners inside went on with the work and completed it before they thought of escaping. Some of the fellows taken had petrol on their clothes. There was quite a good show for about twenty minutes between the Auxiliaries outside and the Shinners trying to get out.”

“Did some chaps get done in?”

“Quite a lot.”

“They seem to have got the laugh on you fellows this time,” I said, nodding over the river again.

“They have,” he agreed.

We stayed a few minutes watching the fire, and then I said, “How did you find things up North?”

He gave me a look meaning there were better places for talking, and we wormed our way to another part of the crowd. The view was not as good; but there was plenty of elbow room.

“Have you been back long?” I asked.

“A day or two.”

“Well, what about things? What’s the good of you if you don’t amuse me?”

“I found the people up there another race as far as outsides go to these people. In a way they’re the complement to the Southerners. If you could scrap the religious question so that North and South could intermarry, I believe a first-class race would be produced. I had a look over the internment camp at Ballykinler while I was in that part of the world.”

“What did you think of the place?”

“It was an internment camp. It doesn’t pretend to be anything better than that. But it was quite a good camp as far as internment camps go. There are about eighteen hundred fellows there in two big enclosures they call cages. Men can go on the run in there if they like. That gives you some idea of the size of the place.”

“It’s pretty country, isn’t it?”

“In good weather; but the men can’t see much more than the mountains. Weather has a lot to do with making a place of that sort bearable or not. The fellows who arrived in the winter must have found it pretty ghastly; but the fellows arriving now haven’t much to complain of beyond the loss of their liberty. In fact, fellows from the slums and from poor country homes were never better off in some ways.”

“That may be; but it must be pretty deadly putting in time.”

“They’ve plenty to do, especially if they like work. The organisation there is quite good. The men are more or less under military discipline, their own military discipline. There’s a commandant, who is an internee, to each cage, and orders trickle through from him. In fact, I find responsible Sinn Feiners saying that it would be a good thing for the nation if all the uneducated fellows could be roped into one of these camps for a bit.”

“They’re educated free, gratis and for nothing?” I asked.

“Arrivals are taken to the commandant’s office and are put through it there, for they are very afraid of spies, and everybody suspects everybody else. Each hut has an intelligence officer to find out what he can about his men, to prevent them talking rashly, and to keep note of all that goes on outside the cages. They try to take the numbers of motor-cars, to remember any faces they can get a glimpse at for future reference, and to glean any information that’s going.”

“But what’s taught?”

“Irish first and foremost. There used to be daily drills; but it has been put a stop to. There’s not much doubt that they still hold military classes in the huts. There appear to be all sorts of other classes—book-keeping, shorthand, and lots of commercial things. There’s a sprinkling of educated chaps among the others. Let’s see what else? There’s football and that kind of thing. There are shops of sorts, too. A young chap can knock a bit of fun out of things. The people who find conditions hardest are elderly cultivated men, and, of course, it must be the devil for fathers of families, who must be wondering whether their people are starving or not.”

“What are the rations like?”

“The same as the soldiers, and if anybody goes short it’s the soldiers. There’d be such a fuss otherwise. At first the Tommies cooked for them; but they made such a fuss they were allowed their own cooks, and the military cooks were left to do their worst among their own people. There are a good many food complaints, chiefly from chaps who never had a square meal in their lives before. Their people send parcels, to the sorrow of the censors, who have to probe into cakes and gape into pots of jam for messages. And some devoted mothers send meat, which goes bad.”

“To the still greater sorrow of the censors?”

“The fellows have built their own chapel and furnished it, and services are held by an interned priest.”

“I suppose letters are censored?”

“Every one of them. It’s the devil’s own job. I gave a hand for a bit. I found it stupefying. Of all the letters I opened, only one remained in my mind five minutes after. It was an in-going letter, a love letter from a girl, a school teacher. This delightful writer had ideals and liked nice things, and he, it seemed, was rather uncouth. She was telling him what he must be dressed in, and how he must look when he came first to see her after release. There were pages of the letter full of tender urgings and gentle reasonings. A fellow feels rather guilty having to put his nose into a thing like that.”

I nodded my head.

“One thing the letters did, they proved how thoroughly the rank and file were under the whip of the leaders. On the days of the out-going mail some leading spirit seemed to order what opinion was to be expressed on this or that event, for in most of the letters there was a single well-turned sentence blooming like a rose in the desert of illiteracy. The brain reeled finding the same thing, said more or less correctly, over and over again. Oh, and another thing these letters did was to make one realise how real a thing religion was to a good many of these people.”

I was looking at the burning building. “I don’t believe that dome is going to go this afternoon.”

“Neither do I, and I can’t wait for it anyhow.”

“Were you at the camp long?”

“Only a day or two. I was on other business. I’m off.”

“When are we going to see you again?”

“We’ll run across each other soon. I don’t suppose I shall be leaving Dublin again.”

I knew once 47 intended to go nothing stopped him. I gave a flourish of my hand, and he flourished his and left me.

He had not gone very long when the Auxiliaries paid us another of their intermittent visits, panic swept over us again, and we retreated to our holes to the sound of hundreds of steps pattering on the quay. These terrible men came along again, leaning over the armoured sides of the car, flashing their eyes, grinding their teeth, waving their guns and crying, “Move along there,” and then, their fury eased, they turned the car about and sped back to Butt Bridge.

The crowd had thinned a good deal since I came, and there was plenty of room to move about. This time who should I run across but Mrs. Slaney? She was standing very stiffly contemplating the burning building.

“It seems rather a pity,” I said.

For once she appeared a little abashed. A great flurry of wind came along, and the inferno within the stone walls glowed, and flames pushed through the stone crevices here and there, leapt out of the windows, climbed through the roof, and turning into smoke, went whirling into the sky. Great pieces of charred material went floating like black birds into the air. All eyes were fixed on the clock, which continued to tick.

“It was the most beautiful building in Ireland,” Mrs. Slaney said. “Many a time I have been in there when I was a girl with my cousins, who held their heads very high on the north side of the city. It seems unfortunate that the Volunteers should have considered it necessary to burn it.” Then the old fire came back. “But England is to blame, England for what has happened. The Customs House represents to us the very heart of England. After Dublin Castle everything that is iniquitous in English rule is most strongly represented by that building. England has caused the ruin of that place just in the same way as she caused the destruction of the Post Office, another of our beautiful buildings.”

I departed before very long, vanquished. The clock was still going at the time; but it had stopped before next morning. The following afternoon I was down that way again when the dome, which seemed to be supporting the statue of Commerce, capitulated. The flames pushed through its joints, like the edges of some starving tongue thrusting up from within; it crumpled, it palpitated, it curled in agony, it disappeared. But the statue stood, defying the lust of the great crowd gathered to see it crash down to the pavement, and was standing high over the wreckage after the last spark had been quenched.

This coup of the Republican Volunteers, though one of the most brilliant they had carried out, was never mentioned with special satisfaction even in the ranks of Sinn Fein. There was regret in the note of rejoicing. Ireland had lost her finest building.