Six days of the Irish Republic Part 8

Technically, of course, the two were exactly parallel--by all the laws of sovereignty a rebel deserves instant death; but it became a question of diplomacy as well--a point which seems to have been lost in the clash of battle.

In other words, had time allowed--and of course there was no knowing what effect the resistance of Dublin might have on the country--it may be a moot point whether it might not have been advisable to separate the two questions of the sentence of death and the actual executions, and one can well imagine the conciliatory effect of a Royal Act of Clemency in the event of maturer consideration making it advisable to commute those sentences.

Thus Lord Bryce, who might have been considered not only to know Ireland from past experience, but to speak with his hand on the mental pulse of the American people on this matter, strongly advised clemency in the following letter to the _Westminster Gazette_, in which he endorsed the advice of Sir West Ridgeway, a former Under-Secretary for Ireland:--

"Permit me to express hearty concurrence with Sir West Ridgeway in the advice which his thoughtful letter of yesterday contains. He knows, as others who have lived in Ireland or have studied her history know, that excessive severities have done far more harm by provoking afresh revengeful disaffection than punishment has ever done to quell it. This was eminently true of the rebellion of 1798, suppressed with a cruelty which shocked the humane minds of the Viceroy (Lord Cornwallis) and Sir Ralph Abercromby. The abortive rising of 1848 (which I am old enough to remember) was treated with a comparative leniency which the public opinion of that day approved, and which was justified by the result. Its chiefs did not become heroes.

"That condign punishment should be meted out to a few of those most responsible for this mad outbreak in Dublin, with its deplorable bloodshed, is inevitable. But this once done, a large and generous clemency is the course recommended by wisdom as well as by pity, and is all the more fitting because it will be a recognition of the fact that the rising was the work of a handful of persons, mostly ignorant, unbalanced visionaries, and is unequivocally condemned by the vast majority of the Irish people.--I am, faithfully yours,

"BRYCE.

"FOREST ROW, SUSs.e.x, _May 4th._"

By this time, however, the matter had almost reached the character of a "pogrom." Not only had the seven signatories of the famous proclamation been executed, but every day brought another victim to the wall and told of another long list of sentences to penal servitude and other penalties, while deportations--the old Cromwellian touch, when the West Indies were peopled with Irish political offenders--reached the colossal figure of over two thousand.

Militarism is of course always a last painful resort, but there were some who seemed to look upon it as an end in itself. A writer in the _Spectator_ said Lord Kitchener must be made Lord-Lieutenant, as the situation called for a soldier, and the hero of Omdurman was the nearest approach to the good old Cromwellian type.

The _Irish Times_, more English than the English themselves, then came out with the following amazing solution:--

"We hope that martial law will be maintained in Ireland for many months. When the time comes for its removal, the change to civil government ought to be smooth and gradual. This end can best be secured--in fact can only be secured--by the presence at the Viceregal Lodge of a soldier who, having taken his part in government under martial law, will be able to transmit the spirit of military administration to the civil instruments of the State."

The situation had reached a crisis, and it was then, and not till then, that the true feeling of the country came out in John Dillon's outburst that be Sir John Maxwell's character what it might--and he confessed to never having heard of him in his life--"he would refuse, and Ireland would refuse, to accept the character of any man as the sole guarantee of a nation's liberty," and the idea of military discretion fell dead at the phrase, shot through the heart.

It was high time too, for, as the case of Sheehy Skeffington proved, that discretion had been so discreet as to be unaware of its own acts, the investigation being promised after execution, which was just our whole complaint against the Germans in Belgium.[1]

The case was particularly striking, as it was only because he happened to be a well-known public man that any attention was paid to it, and it tended to give credence to the horrible rumours which now began to spread through Dublin of the secret carnage which was supposed to have taken place during what was euphemistically called "the rounding-up of the rebels" and "house-to-house visitation," while the citizens of Dublin were confined to their own houses under penalty of death if they stirred out without a permit after certain hours: and one has only to walk through the slums to hear the colossal proportions which these rumours have already attained, and which nothing but public civil investigation will stay.

I had noticed Sheehy Skeffington myself upon the Tuesday, looking very anxious and perplexed, and walking by himself without arms, and the point struck me at the time because of the remark of my companion that it was rather strange that he did not seem to be in any way officially connected with the rebels.

It was in Sackville Street--just at the time when the looting was being carried on in North Earl Street, where they had been making a barricade--and with a paper in his hand, possibly the very notice he was contemplating, he went in the direction of the Post Office porch, as if to go in and consult about something that was on his mind: again I presume to try to stop the looting, for a couple of hours later I saw the crowd of looters scattered several times by the firing of shots in their direction; and when the Imperial Hotel was raided, a Sinn Feiner told me not to be alarmed at this when leaving the city, as they were only blanks and intended to prevent the wholesale robbery that was going on.

As a matter of fact, as his wife afterwards explained, Skeffington, far from taking any part in the rising, was actually helping to look after the innocent victims of the affray, such as the Dublin Castle officer who was bleeding to death in the street, and this at imminent personal danger to himself; and at the time of his arrest near Portobello Bridge was actually engaged in the work of trying to stop the looting, having just come back from a meeting called to that effect, and had been putting up the following poster:--

"When there are no regular police in the streets it becomes the duty of the citizens to police the streets themselves, to prevent such spasmodic looting as has taken place.

"Civilians (both men and women) who are willing to co-operate to this end are asked to attend at Westmoreland Chambers (over Eden Bros.) at five o'clock on this (Tuesday) afternoon.

"FRANCIS SHEEHY SKEFFINGTON."

Far from being a combatant, he was on principle a pacifist, and thus opposed to all use of physical force; but perhaps it is better to let his own wife tell the story:--

"After he was arrested and had been sentenced to death," to use the statement which she issued to the Press, "he refused to be blindfolded, and met death with a smile on his lips, saying before he died that the authorities would find out after his death what a mistake they made."

Now, the concession of the mere possibility of such a colossal blunder was, of course, the admission of the whole of John Dillon's contention--namely, that, whatever might happen in Egypt, Ireland was right in not accepting the discretion of any man as the sole guarantee of her liberties.

For if it could happen in such an eminent case, there could hardly be any doubt but that there was considerable truth in the rumours that similar catastrophes were taking place all over Dublin, and indeed all over Ireland, and this in such a way as to madden the Irish people, and spread, if not insurrection, at least disaffection and bitterness from one end of the country to the other; but it is useless, before an official investigation, to go into such examples as the Eustace Street and King Street cases. Public investigations at the moment, however, would restore no lives, and possibly only endanger the chances of reconciliation, which is the one great need of Ireland in the name of Empire.

Quite apart from any examples, however, John Dillon maintained that the system in itself was far more likely to prejudice than to attain the very ends expected of it, "for, if they only knew it, the British Cabinet had far less power in Dublin than the Kildare Street Club and certain other inst.i.tutions which were running the military authorities;"

but he struck the keynote of the situation when he said: "Ours is a fighting race, and, as I told you when I was speaking before on the Military Service Bill, it is not a Military Service Bill that you want in Ireland. If you had pa.s.sed a Military Service Bill for Ireland it would have taken 150,000 men and three months' hard fighting to have dealt with it. It is not a Military Service Bill that you want in Ireland; it is to find a way to the hearts of the Irish people, and when you do that you will find that you have got a supply of the best troops in the whole world."

Yet what John Dillon resented most, as indeed every moderate man in Ireland resented it, was the insinuation that the rising had been nothing more nor less than an orgy of murder by a band of criminals, so that it accordingly rendered every single Sinn Feiner liable to be shot at sight, whether he had actually taken part in the insurrection or not.

For this conception the band of English journalists who had been sent over under escort to the captured capital were much to blame. With pens reeking with the description of Hunnish crimes, they wrote their accounts of "nameless atrocities" which were supposed to have taken place in Dublin, and which, if they astounded their English readers, absolutely amazed their Irish ones.

The danger of this hate campaign which may be all very well when it is intended to rouse the somewhat lethargic Briton to fight against a race of which he knows next to nothing otherwise; but was doubly dangerous when applied to one's fellow-countrymen in the name of a party, and were it employed, say, against Wales or Scotland would soon prove disastrous, for Scotchmen and Welshmen would rise in protest to a man--which is just what Irishmen did at the "hate" wave.

Yet there was another reason--viz. the veracity and moderation of the British Press--at stake: the Press on whose veracity and moderation Irishmen depended for their motives for going away to fight for England, and this excess tended, so to speak, to tear down every recruiting poster in the country.

Now, had the British censor refused to allow any mention of the rising at all in the English Press, it might have been unjust to Ireland, but it would have been far juster to England. Much the same applies to the English Churchmen and their Church. When the Rev. R. J. Campbell, in a Sunday ill.u.s.trated, discovered that Holy Writ had already long before the rising declared in favour of Castle government and conscription for Ireland, Irish sinners felt inclined to say: "So much the worse for Holy Writ." And when the Rev. Lord William Cecil, preaching at Hatfield, summed up the ethical situation in a confusion between the meaning of pride and patriotism, Dublin wits thanked him for the phrase, and remarked that indeed it had long been so, but ne'er so well expressed, and amplified the cynical aphorism to "whenever Irishmen are patriotic it is in reality nothing but pride, yet whenever Englishmen are overproud it is nothing but the height of patriotism."

None, in fact, could have damaged the English cause in this crisis more than the English did themselves, in spite of all the Irish Nationalists were doing to help them out of the difficulty; for, as one wit remarked, the whole catastrophe had been precipitated not by English Tories so much as Irish Unionists--men, who it is difficult to say whether they misrepresent England more to Irishmen than they do Irishmen to the English, and a cla.s.s which has ever got England into all Irish crises and never got her out of a single one.

For the main point about the rebellion that struck Nationalists, who, after all, were the vast majority of the Irishmen who at all mattered, was not so much the incidental crime or heroism as the utter folly of the enterprise. "Separatism" was, and will ever be probably, an economic, racial, and Imperial impossibility; yet it was just this point that was forgotten in the heat of the combat by Englishmen, with a few n.o.ble exceptions, of course.

Instead of expounding the folly of the undertaking, they preferred to dilate upon the criminality of methods and the character of the Sinn Feiners, which is just where they fell into the most fatal mistake of all and made the aftermath what it has been since--a far more complicated problem to deal with than ever existed before the rising or in the rising itself. Thus, when Sir Edward Carson raised his Volunteers in Ulster he had calculated most upon the moral effect the spilling of blood would have upon Englishmen. The Sinn Feiners had calculated upon exactly the same psychological factor with their countrymen.

When the Government had refused to take their arms by force, which Unionists were in their hearts hoping they would, the refusal left them powerless and discredited, save in the eyes of cinema operators, who only looked upon them as so much copy.

When the authorities proposed, after this example, to take the arms of the Sinn Feiners and leave the other two bodies in possession of theirs, they were, in fact, deliberately provoking rebellion; but not only this, but unconsciously they were also strengthening the cause of the Sinn Feiners, who, like the Covenanters, looked more to the moral effect than to the material results of their efforts.

Once the link of race had been appealed to, of course every attack that reflected in any way upon the character of the fighters was resented by the whole nation as a matter of honour, and that was what led John Dillon, provoked by countless insinuations and accusations to his onslaught upon the principle underlying the wholesale executions and deportations.

Had these penalties been inflicted upon those who had perpetrated the "cold-blooded murders" of the first few days, whose cry for vengeance had been voiced by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it would have been equally a matter of national pride to see the culprits were yielded up to justice; but "it was not these murderers that were being pursued," as Dillon pointed out; it was the rank and file of the insurgents, and these had, by almost universal admission, behaved in a manner absolutely beyond reproach as fighting men. He admitted they were wrong, but they fought a clean fight, and they fought with superb bravery and skill, and no act of savagery or act against the usual customs of war, that he knew of, had been brought home to any leader or any organized body of insurgents.

The House was inclined to resent the tribute--as much as to say that they were nothing but a pack of cowards--and this brought out a characteristically telling taunt, namely, "that it would be a d.a.m.ned good thing for England if her soldiers had been able to put up as good a fight as did these men in Dublin--three thousand men against twenty thousand with machine guns and artillery"--which, coming at the very moment of the announcement of the fall of Kut, must have been particularly galling.

Now, it was doubly a pity that such a controversy had been aroused, for, as most intelligent people in Dublin had begun to admit, it had been a heroic if tragically mad combat from the beginning.

Not that there had not been the most cold-blooded murders, I repeat, upon the part of some of the rank and file within the first few hours, when every representative of the law was suddenly attacked unawares, as if there had been a formal declaration of war; but from the first moment that they had felt their position nothing can be attributed to the rebel leaders which was not in the most complete accord with military precedent.

Indeed, not a few of the soldiers were struck by the self-control of the Volunteers, and the sense of discipline that pervaded their ranks; nor was it surprising, considering that while some of the Derby boys had only been in khaki for a couple of months the Volunteers had been in training ever since the beginning of the war, going through route marches, manoeuvres, and sham fighting week by week and, towards the end, night by night.

True, the money may have been appropriated from such Government supplies as fell into their hands, and there is no doubt that technically they had no right to such stores; but they had every precedent, and there is even a story which tells of one of the leaders particularly asking one of the captured military to see that the safe in the G.P.O. was not touched.

There were certainly no cases of prisoners surrendering and being instantly shot; nor did civilians complain of any wanton looting of the occupied premises, though at Jacobs's and Boland's full use was made of the stores; nor were there any of the Volunteers found drunk. Certainly they should have prevented looting, but it was a duty as much inc.u.mbent upon any civilian.

In other words, in so far as it could reflect upon the national character, there was little that could be reproached against the movement save its insensate folly and, of course, the technical criminality of revolt.

On the whole the thing was on a far higher ethical plane than the methods employed by the Fenians, as well as more widespread, and the thing was far and away more dignified than poor Smith O'Brien's rising, which ended, as it began, in a humble cabbage-patch.

Some of their bullets were of course of the vilest type, inflicting ghastly wounds; but I heard of no misuse of the white flag--in fact, when the ladies who had been found in the College of Surgeons were offered their freedom as non-combatants because they had merely been doing hospital work, they refused on the ground that as they were in full sympathy with the movement they claimed the full honours of the penalties of failure.

Two things, however, must be mentioned--the one was their use of civilian clothes, and the second was their employment of "sniping"

methods, both of which were highly dangerous to the rest of the non-combatant population.

With regard to the first--the use of civilian clothes--everybody who possessed a uniform wore it, but the enthusiasm of the recruits outran the means of equipment; and in any case it was adopted equally by the military, who in not a few cases owed their lives to a quick change into mufti, and who in other cases spent most of Monday and Tuesday in Sackville Street in smart lounge suits as pa.s.sive spectators of the scene, when as a matter of fact they were merely spying out--and of course rightly so doing--the movements of the Sinn Feiners, together with their strength and dispositions, and then 'phoning up the information to headquarters.