The Red Hand of Ulster Part 22

The scene outside the station was striking. A considerable body of dragoons, some mounted, some on foot beside their horses, were grouped together near the great gate which led into the railway company's yard. Their accoutrements and the bridles of their horses jangled at every movement in a way very suggestive of military ardour. The trappings of horse soldiers are evidently made as noisy as possible.

Perhaps with the idea of keeping up the spirits of the men. Some Highlanders, complete in their kilts, stood opposite the dragoons at the other end of the yard. A sergeant was shouting explosive monosyllables at them in order to make them turn to the left or to the right as he thought desirable. Behind them were some other soldiers, Englishmen I presume, who wore ordinary trousers. They were sitting on a flight of stone steps eating chunks of dry bread. Their rifles were neatly stacked behind them. Round the motor car were about thirty men whom I hesitate to call civilians, because they had rifles in their hands; but who were certainly not real soldiers, for they had no uniforms. They looked to me like young farmers.

"My fellows," said Bob, pointing to these men. "Pretty tidy looking lot, aren't they? I brought them along as a sort of guard of honour for Marion. They're not really the least necessary; but I thought you and she might be pleased to see them."

Here and there, scattered among the military and Bob's irregular troops, were black uniformed policemen, rosy-faced young men, fresh from a healthy life among the cattle ranches of Roscommon, drafted to their own immense bewilderment into this strange city of Belfast, where no one regarded them with any reverence, or treated them with the smallest respect. The motor car started, creeping at a walking pace through the mingled crowd of armed men who thronged the entrance to the station. Our guard of honour, some of them smoking, some stopping for a moment to exchange greetings with acquaintance, kept up with us pretty well. Then, as we got clear of the station and went faster, we left our guard behind. One man indeed, with a singular devotion to duty, poked his rifle into the car and then ran alongside of us with his hand on the mudguard. He carried Marion's trunk into the hotel when we got there.

Our drive was an exciting one. At every street corner there were parties of soldiers. Along every street stalwart policemen strolled in pairs. There were certainly hundreds of armed irregulars. For the most part these men seemed to be under no control; but occasionally we met a party marching in something like military formation, led by an officer, grave with responsibility. One company, I remember, got in our way and for a long time could not get out of it. Their officer had been drilling them carefully and they were all most anxious to obey his orders. The difficulty was that he could not recollect at the moment what orders he ought to give to get them out of our way. He halted them to begin with. Then in firm tones, he commanded a half-right turn and a quick march. We had to back our car to avoid collision with the middle part of the column. Their officer halted them again. We offered to go back and take another route to our hotel; but the officer would not hear of this. He told his men to stand at ease while he consulted a handbook on military evolutions. In the end he gave the problem up.

"Get out of the way, will you," he said, "and form up again when the car is past."

This was unconventional, but quite effective. The men--and it is to their credit that not one of them smiled--broke their formation, scattered to right and left and reformed after we had pa.s.sed. This took place in a narrow side street in which there was very little traffic. I recognized the wisdom of the officer in choosing such a place for his manoeuvres.

In the main streets the business of the town seemed to be going on very much as usual. It was Sat.u.r.day afternoon. Shops and offices were closing. Young men and girls pa.s.sed out of them and thronged the trams which were leaving the centre of the city. They took very little notice of the soldiers or the police. In the poorer streets women with baskets on their arms were doing their weekly shopping at the stalls of small butchers and greengrocers. Groups of factory girls marched along with linked arms, enjoying their outing, unaffected apparently by the unusual condition of their streets. The newspaper boys did a roaring trade, shrieking promises of sensational news to be found in the pages of the _Telegraph_ and _Echo_.

Marion became intensely excited.

"Doesn't it look just as if the town had been captured by an enemy,"

she said, "after a long siege?"

"It hasn't been captured yet," said Bob.

I have often tried to understand how it was that Bob Power came to take the active part he did in the fighting which followed, and how he came to be in command of a body of volunteers. He had not, so far as I know, any actual hatred of the idea of Home Rule. He was too light-hearted to be in full sympathy with fanatical Puritans like Crossan and McNeice. He certainly had no hatred of the British Empire or the English army. He was, up to the last moment, on friendly terms with those of the army officers whom he happened to know. He chatted with them and with detached inspectors of police in the same friendly way as he did with Henderson at the railway station.

I can only suppose that he regarded the whole business--to begin with at all events--as a large adventure of a novel and delightful kind. He went into it very much as many volunteers went into the Boer War, without any very strong convictions about the righteousness of the cause in which he fought, certainly without any realization of the horror of actual bloodshed.

There are men of this temperament, fortunately a good many of them. If they did not exist in large numbers the world's fighting would be very badly done. The mere mercenary--uninspired by the pa.s.sion for adventure--will at the best do as little fighting as possible, and do it with the smallest amount of ardour. Fanatics cannot be had to order. Some kind of idea--in most cases a religious idea--is necessary to turn the ordinary church-going business man or farmer into an efficient fighting unit. The kind of patriotism which is prepared to make sacrifices, to endure bodily pain and risk death, is very rare.

It is on the men who enjoy risk, who love struggle, who face death with a laugh, the men of Bob Power's reckless temperament, that the world must rely when it wants fighting done. Hitherto men of this kind have been plentiful. Whether our advancing civilization is going to destroy the breed is a question which, I am pleased to say, need not be answered by my generation. There are enough Bob Powers alive to last my time.

CHAPTER XVIII

I fully intended to go to church on Sunday morning. I was, in fact, waiting for Marion at the door of the hotel, when Sir Samuel c.l.i.thering came to see me.

"I shall be so much obliged," he said, "if you will spare me a few minutes."

I did not want to spare any minutes to Sir Samuel c.l.i.thering. In the first place I had promised to take Marion to the cathedral. "A Parade Service"--I quote the official t.i.tle of the function--was to be held for the benefit of the volunteers and Marion naturally wanted to see Bob Power at the head of his men. I wanted to hear the men singing that hymn again, and I wanted to hear what sort of sermon the Dean--our Dean, not the Dean of the cathedral--would preach on such an occasion. He was advertised to preach, as "Chaplain General of the Loyalists." These were three good reasons for not giving Sir Samuel c.l.i.thering the few minutes he demanded. I had, also, a fourth. I had held, as I have related, previous communications with c.l.i.thering. I suspected him of having more peerages in his pocket for distribution, and I did not want to undertake any further negotiations like that with Conroy. He might even--and I particularly disliked the idea--be empowered to offer our Dean an English bishopric.

I kept this last reason to myself, but I stated the other three fully to Sir Samuel. He seemed dissatisfied.

"Everybody's going to church," he complained. "I can't get Lord Moyne.

I can't get Babberly. I can't get Malcolmson, and it's really most important that I should see some one. Going to church is all very well--"

"As a leading Nonconformist," I said.

"Free Churchman," said Sir Samuel.

"I beg your pardon, Free Churchman. You ought not to object to people going to church. I've always understood that the Free Churchmen are honourably distinguished from other Christians by their respect for the practice of Sunday wors.h.i.+p."

"Of course, I don't object to people going to church. I should be there myself if it were not that--"

He hesitated. I thought he might be searching for an appropriate text of Scripture so I helped him.

"Your a.s.s," I said, "has fallen into a pit, and you want--"

This was evidently not exactly the text he wanted. He seemed astonished when I quoted it.

"a.s.s!" he said. "What a.s.s?"

"The Government," I said. "It is in rather a hole, isn't it?"

"Capital," said c.l.i.thering, laughing without the smallest appearance of mirth, "capital! I didn't catch the point for a moment, but I do now. My a.s.s has fallen into a pit. You put the matter in a nutsh.e.l.l, Lord Kilmore. I don't mind confessing that a pit of rather an inconvenient size does lie in front of us. I feel sure that you, as a humane man, won't refuse your help in the charitable work of helping to get us out."

Marion came downstairs in her best hat. It was not for nothing that Bob Power and I and the running volunteer had struggled with her trunk. Her frock, also, was charming.

"Your daughter," said c.l.i.thering. "Now my dear young lady, you must spare your father to me for an hour. Affairs of state. Affairs of state. But you'll allow me to send you to church in my car. My private secretary is in it, and I shall tell him to see you safely to church, to secure a seat for you--"

"The Dean has reserved seats for us," I said.

"Capital, capital. We can regard that as settled then. My private secretary--an excellent young fellow whom I picked up at Toynbee Hall--a student of our social problems--a man whom I'm sure you'll like."

He conducted Marion to the door and handed her over to the private secretary from Toynbee Hall. I resigned myself and led c.l.i.thering to a deserted smoking-room.

"I never saw so much church-going anywhere," he said. "It's most remarkable. I don't think the Government quite appreciates--"

As a matter of fact the percentage of church-going men on that particular Sunday was considerably over the average. On the other hand there were much fewer women than usual. Every church of every Protestant denomination was holding a "Parade Service" for volunteers, and most of the women who tried to get in had to be turned away from the doors. I thought it well to rub the facts in a little.

"Rack-renting landlords," I said. "Sweating capitalists, and clergymen whose churches are empty because their congregations are tired of hearing them curse the Pope!"

"Eh?" said c.l.i.thering, "what's that? what's that?"

"Only a quotation," I said. "I forget if it was a Cabinet Minister--"

"Not at all," said c.l.i.thering. "I recollect the words now. It was one of the Irish Members. No Cabinet Minister would dream of saying such things. We have a high sense of the importance of the Ulster problem.

Nothing, I a.s.sure you, is further from our minds than the desire to minimize or treat with undue flippancy the conscientious objections, even the somewhat unreasonable fears of men whom we recognize as--"

c.l.i.thering paused. I had not anything particular to say, so I waited for him to begin again.

"I understand," he said, "that a meeting of the Unionist Defence Committee is to be held this afternoon."

"Yes," I said. "I'm going to it. I'm not really a member of the committee, at least I wasn't until yesterday; but--"

"I quite understand, quite understand. In fact--speaking now in the strictest confidence--I may say that the suggestion to add your name to the committee was made--well it was made to Lady Moyne by a very important person. It was generally recognized that a man of your well-known moderation--"

I was beginning to dislike being called a man of moderation nearly as much as I disliked being called a Liberal.

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.