John Redmond's Last Years Part 12

It could only be carried out through him, and for success he must be consulted in detail. Neither Lord Kitchener nor General Parsons in fact recognized the status which this implied. They were prepared to listen to suggestions from him; they were not prepared to accept guidance, as they must have done had he been Prime Minister of the country.

It was impossible that Redmond's att.i.tude in dealing with General Parsons should not imply some sense of the position which he held; equally impossible, from the temper and mentality of the man, that there should not be in General Parsons's letters an underlying a.s.sertion that in military matters the military must decide.

The correspondence between the two men opened by a letter from Sir Lawrence Parsons, who had just established his headquarters at Mallow; and its chief purpose was to direct Redmond's attention to the fact that an Irish Division was a much finer and n.o.bler unit than an Irish Brigade. Two points in it, however, are of interest. "I have been appointed by Lord Kitchener," said General Parsons, "because I am an Irishman and understand my countrymen." Also, "I have had a considerable share in selecting the officers of the Division, almost all Irishmen of every political and religious creed."

What lay behind the first of these sentences was a profound conviction that the writer thoroughly understood the necessities of the situation.

That was a disastrous mistake. To understand Ireland at such a moment was difficult for anyone, impossible for a man who had not been in close touch with the mental condition produced by all these extraordinary happenings. The effect of the preparations for rebellion in Ulster, of the Curragh incident, and of the collision between troops and people in Dublin--the effect of the existence of a permitted Nationalist Volunteer Force--the effect of Redmond's appeal: these were three completely novel and conflicting currents in the stream of Irish life. n.o.body could hope to estimate these developments from a general view, however intelligent, of Irish history and character, nor even from the most intimate and sympathetic acquaintance with Irish troops of the old Army.

A proof of the unhappy lack of comprehension is furnished by the second sentence I have quoted. General Parsons had been most rightly allowed by the War Office to a.s.sist in selecting officers for the Division. But it had never occurred to either party to consult Redmond on this critical matter. Does anyone suppose that Sir Edward Carson had no voice in the staffing of the Ulster Division? He had at all events received from the first a clear promise that all professional soldiers who had been officers in the Ulster Volunteers would be officers in the Division, and that any who had been mobilized should be restored to their a.s.sociates in the Division.

General Parsons brought to this whole matter the fine principle that no man's religious or political beliefs should stand in his way. He omitted to consider the effect produced on the situation by the fact that the Ulster Division had been actually allowed to exclude all Catholics, as such, and to accept no officer who was not politically in sympathy with Unionist Ulster. Redmond had not the least wish to exclude either Protestants or Unionists; he wanted all Irishmen on an equality. But he was bound by common sense and by a perception of realities to desire that Protestants and Unionists should not appear to monopolize the command.

Not one of the three brigadiers appointed was generally known in Ireland, personally or by his connections. One was an Englishman. Of the officers originally appointed not one in five was a Catholic. No Catholic commanded a battalion, scarcely half a dozen were field officers. The only Catholic field officer appointed to the Division who had been prominently connected with the Volunteers was Lord Fingall, and he had severed his connection with that body.

All this was a terrible blunder. Whether it was wise or unwise to allow the formation of a division having the peculiar character of the Ulster Division may be argued--but certainly Redmond never took exception to it, and no man who ever saw these Ulstermen in the field can regret its inception. But once it was formed, its existence created a situation which had to be recognized. An equivalent ought to have been given; but no genuine attempt to do this was made.

In replying to Sir Lawrence Parsons, Redmond raised no controversy as to what had been done; he was, indeed, not cognizant of the facts. But he addressed himself from the first to making friendly suggestions.

Amongst other things he referred to an appeal which Sir Lawrence Parsons had addressed to the women of Ireland, that they should provide regimental colours for the battalions of the Division. This appeal was promptly met, to Redmond's great delight--delight which was soon changed into vexation, for the War Office stepped in, declared the proceeding irregular, and prohibited the holding of colours by any temporary battalion. General Parsons was obliged to publish an explanation which must have been galling to himself, and which went far to confirm the impression that the War Office, with all its preoccupations, had time to keep an unfriendly eye on the Nationalist recruiting effort.

Another trivial matter led to prolonged and irritating controversy.

Towards the end of October the Belfast and Dublin papers announced that the Army Council had approved of "an Ulster badge similar to that worn by Ulster Volunteers" as a cap badge for all troops in the Ulster Division. It was pointed out that this would have the effect of preserving the ident.i.ty of the Ulster Division. Immediately, and not unnaturally, the demand for a similar concession was put forward on behalf of the Sixteenth Division. General Parsons was opposed, as any old soldier would be, to a variation in the distinguishing marks of old and famous regiments. He did not allow for the fact that we needed to attract new soldiers in ma.s.ses--men who as yet knew nothing of regimental tradition. Still, he co-operated in forwarding Redmond's desire, which was to meet a widely spread sentimental demand. Now that the war is over, many soldiers argue that there is no reason in the nature of things why Irish regiments should not have a clearly distinguishing uniform, as the Scots or the Colonials do. In the last months, when recruiting was a matter of urgency, Colonel Lynch induced the War Office to consent to equipping an Irish Brigade with a completely distinctive dress; unhappily the pattern was (after several months) still under discussion when the war ended. I have little doubt that from the point of view of recruiting even the badge, to say nothing of a distinctive uniform, would have been an a.s.set; I have no doubt at all that the refusal of it was a set-back, because it was a refusal given after a discussion and correspondence which lasted from November till February. The most interesting point, however, is that Lord Kitchener found time to occupy himself repeatedly with this question in the period between the first and second battles of Ypres. If his intervention had been judicious, it would have been as impressive as the spectacle of a battery elephant stopping in action to pick up a pin with his trunk.

On one point Redmond's representations, heartily backed by General Parsons, were successful. Catholic chaplains, of whom no adequate number were at first provided for Irish troops, were secured. It is pleasant to note that Lord Roberts, who before the war had been vehement on the Ulster side, used his personal influence to support this application. A month or two later, when death came to the veteran, dramatically, among the troops in France, Redmond told the House of Commons how on that question Lord Roberts had met him in the friendliest way and endeavoured to arrange for attending the great meeting at the Dublin Mansion House.

On another matter Redmond was able to a.s.sist the equipment of the Division. He suggested, and General Parsons fully admitted the value of, regimental bands; but the War Office made no grants for them. Redmond drew upon a large sum which had been placed at his disposal by a private individual to further his campaign, and all our battalions were indebted to him for their fife and drum equipment. There was, in short, no detail in which he was not willing and anxious to a.s.sist the Division and its commander. But the friction between the two men was unmistakable.

The most serious cause of it was the line taken by General Parsons about the appointment of officers. He laid down a rule, which I think would have had excellent results if enforced throughout the whole of the new armies, that no man should be recommended for a commission without previous military experience, and that candidates lacking that experience must put in a period of service in the ranks. He set apart a special company in one battalion, the 7th Leinsters, to which such men should be sent, so that while drilling and exercising with the rest of the battalion, and enjoying no special privilege, they ate and slept and lived together in their own barrack rooms.

Yet the obstacle thus set up deterred a good many of the less zealous, who could not understand why that should be made a condition in the Irish Division which was not so in the Ulster Division--nor, indeed, so far as I know, anywhere else at that time. Men who had been officers of Ulster Volunteers got their commissions as a matter of course; the officer of National Volunteers had to prove his competence in the cadet company. General Parsons fully admitted this difference of treatment, and justified it by saying to Redmond that in consequence of it he would be very sorry to change officers with the Ulster Division. One cannot refuse to admire such a spirit; but he ought to have asked himself whether it was fair to impose a handicap on Redmond's efforts.

Everything turned on getting representative young men from the Volunteers, and from the correspondence it appears that few were coming from the South and West. From the North they poured in. In our 47th Brigade, the 6th Royal Irish Regiment was mainly composed of Derry Nationalists; the 7th Leinsters and the 6th Connaught Rangers were almost to a man followers of Mr. Devlin from Belfast.

Next after Redmond, Mr. Devlin was the man to whom our Division owed most. But the first and the main impetus came from Redmond himself. He spoke on October 4th at Wexford, the capital of his native county; on the 11th at Waterford, his own const.i.tuency; on the 18th at Kilkenny, the const.i.tuency of his close friend Pat O'Brien. A week later he was at Belfast and in the glens of Antrim, among the Nationalists of Ulster.

Then Parliament kept him for a few weeks; in December he was back, and spoke at Tuam and in Limerick. Everywhere the Volunteers turned out in great numbers to receive him; and to them his appeal was primarily addressed.

At Wexford he laid stress on Mr. Asquith's pledge that the Volunteers should remain as a recognized permanent force for the defence of the country, and this led him to raise frankly the question of control. Who should have authority over Volunteers in a State? Surely the elected and responsible government. But pending Home Rule, "the policy and control of the Volunteers must rest with the elected representatives of the country."

More generally, he reminded them that he had always spoken of the possibility of some great political convulsion that might destroy their plans. "Nothing but an earthquake can now prevent Home Rule," he had said. "The outbreak of this overwhelming war might easily have overwhelmed Home Rule. But we have survived it."

And he went on to argue that the delay might be a blessing in disguise.

Civil war between Irishmen had always seemed to him an impossibility.

That impossibility was now universally admitted. In a pa.s.sage of unusual heat he denounced the "so-called statesmen" who came over unasked to our country to inflame feelings--as Mr. Bonar Law had done; and he appealed to all sections "to enable us to utilize the interval before a Home Rule Parliament a.s.sembles to unite all Irishmen under a Home Rule Government."

At Waterford he was largely occupied with repelling the charge that he and his colleagues had made a bargain with the Government to ship Irish Volunteers overseas to fight whether they would or no. This was the line on which opposition was developing, and it was a.s.sisted by articles in the English Press, which laid it down that unless the Irish furnished a sufficiency of recruits, Home Rule should be repealed.

An extension of this argument, that Redmond was buying Home Rule with the blood of young Irishmen, raised the question whether Home Rule was worth the price. While the Bill was not yet law, it was a flag, a symbol. Once it became an Act, men's att.i.tude changed; they turned to criticizing what they had got; and one powerful newspaper, bitterly hostile to the Parliamentary party, expended much ingenuity in exaggerating the limitations of what had been gained. While one set of critics endeavoured to show how miserable was the price obtained, another dwelt on the unrighteousness of making such a bargain without Ireland's consent. In Redmond's speech at Kilkenny there was a note of resentment. He refused at any great crisis to consider "what might please the gallery or the crowd, or might spare him the insults of a handful of cornerboys."

But the kernel of all his thought was put into one sentence by him at Belfast. "The proper place to guard Ireland is on the battlefields of France." It was from Belfast after this meeting that the first striking demonstration of response came--organized and inspired by Mr. Devlin. On November 20th nearly a full battalion of recruits, many National Volunteers, entrained for Fermoy; a week later they were followed by another great detachment. The example spread; and when Redmond spoke at Limerick on December 20th, the _Irish Times_ in a friendly leading article admitted that "the National Volunteers were now coming forward in large numbers and the Irish Brigade was going to be a credit to the country." This was a very different note from that which had come from Unionist quarters at earlier stages.

III

So far as recruiting went, Redmond had won. He was sure of making good to England. But in what concerned making good to Ireland, he had no progress to report. He stated that already nearly 16,500 men from the Volunteers had joined the Army, and he could not understand why Government was so chary of giving a.s.sistance to train and equip this force. There was no doubt as to the ma.s.s of men available. Figures supplied by the police to the Chief Secretary estimated that between September 24th, when the split took place, and October 31st, out of 170,000 Volunteers, only a trifle over 12,000 adhered to Professor MacNeill.

But in Dublin the opponents were nearly 2,000 out of 6,700; and two strong battalions went almost solid against Redmond. These battalions, along with the Citizens' Army, were destined to alter the course of Irish history. It was specially true of them, but true generally of all the minority who left Redmond, that they were kept together by a resolute and determined group who had a clear purpose.

The "Irish Volunteers," as the dissentients called themselves, were made to feel that they were a minority, and an unpopular minority in more than one instance. In Galway, when they turned out to parade the streets, they were driven off with casualties--retaliation for their interference with our meeting in September. In Dundalk there was a somewhat similar occurrence. But they got more than their own back one day in November by a bold _coup_--forerunner of many. Ninety rifles belonging to the National Volunteers were being moved in a cart from one place to another. Half a dozen men armed with revolvers held up the cart and its driver and carried off the rifles. At their Convention, held in the end of October, Professor MacNeill said: "They would go on with the work of organizing, training and equipping a Volunteer force for the service of Ireland in Ireland, and such a force might yet be the means of saving Home Rule from disaster, and of compelling the Home Rule Government to keep faith with Ireland without the exaction of a price in blood."

That forecast has not as yet realized itself; and many of us think that the chief achievement of this section has been to turn to waste a heavy price that was paid in blood by other men for the sake of Ireland. But unquestionably they were, though the minority, far more of a living reality than the ma.s.s of the original force--and for a simple reason.

Their purpose, whether good or bad, was within their own control. The purpose of the majority was to carry out Redmond's policy--which was to make the Volunteers part of an Irish army of which the striking force was designed to defend Ireland on the battlefields of Flanders. But to carry out that policy the National Volunteers must be accepted as a purely local Irish military organization for home defence--controlled, in the absence of a popularly elected Irish Government, by the elected Irish representatives. The War Office thwarted that policy. Lord Kitchener would not accept it. He continued to be of the opinion that by equipping Redmond's followers he would be arming enemies.

It is worth noting that one of the ablest and most detached students of Irish affairs was wholly on Redmond's side. Lord Dunraven, appealing on behalf of "the new Irish Brigade," pointed out that both sides of Redmond's policy must be accepted. "No scheme which fails to take some account of the National Volunteer Force can do justice to what Ireland can give," he wrote. But was there everywhere a desire to do justice to what Ireland could give--and was willing to give? Redmond was warned in those days by an influential correspondent in England that a deliberate policy was being pursued by the opponents of Home Rule, who undoubtedly had strong backing in the War Office. The National Volunteers were to become the objects of derision and contempt, which would extend to himself. By keeping the Volunteers out of active partic.i.p.ation in war service, it could be proved that Redmond did not speak for Ireland or represent Ireland; that the Irish were raising unreal objections so as to keep an excuse for avoiding danger. It was urged on him that he should press for the extension of the Territorial Act to Ireland and endeavour to bring his men in on this footing.

There were two difficulties in the way of this scheme which nevertheless attracted him strongly. The first was that enlistment in the Territorials for home service had been stopped--so that the proposal had little advantage, if any, over enlistment in the Irish brigades. The second was due to the Volunteers themselves, many of whom, though willing to serve in the war, were unwilling to take the oath of allegiance.

There were limits to the length to which Redmond felt himself able to go, and he never dealt with this objection by argument. The example which he set was plain to all. He joined in singing "G.o.d save the King,"

in drinking the King's health, and at Aughavanagh now he flew the Union Jack beside the Green flag. He was willing to take part in any demonstration which implied that Nationalist Ireland under its new legal status accepted its lot in the British Empire fully and without reserve.

It was superfluous for him to argue that Nationalists might consistently take the oath of allegiance when Nationalists were pledging their lives in the King's service beside every other kind of citizen in the British Empire. Over and above his own example was the example of his brother and his son. On November 23rd Willie Redmond addressed a great meeting in Cork and told them, "I won't say to you go, but come with me." He was then fifty-three--and for most men it would have been "too late a week." But no man was ever more instinctively a soldier, and to soldiering he had gone by instinct as a boy. He was an officer in the Wexford Militia for a year or two, till politics drove him out of that service and drew him into another. Now he went to the war gravely but joyfully. I think those days did not bring into relief any more picturesque or sympathetic figure.

One thing ought to be said. Mr. Devlin wished to join also, but Redmond held that he could not be spared from Ireland, where his influence was enormous; and he was placed in a somewhat unfair position, even though everyone who knew him knew that his chief attribute was personal courage. But he was indispensable for the work which had to be done, of helping at this strange crisis to keep Ireland peaceful and united at a time when Government was at its lowest ebb of authority.

Trouble threatened. On October 11th, the anniversary of Parnell's death, three bodies of Volunteers turned out in Dublin--the National Volunteers, the Irish Volunteers, and the Citizen Army. A collision occurred which might easily have become serious. This pa.s.sed off, but early in December the Government suppressed three or four of the openly anti-British papers, which were, of course, still more virulent against Redmond. They reappeared under other names. But a meeting of protest against the suppression was held outside Liberty Hall. Mr. Larkin had, by this time, gone to America. His chief colleague, Mr. James Connolly, who was the brain of the Irish Labour Movement, presided, and at the close declared that the meeting had been held under the protection of an armed company of the Citizen Army posted in the windows and on the roof of Liberty Hall. Had the police or military attempted to disperse the meeting, he said, "those rifles would not have been silent."

Ulster was not the only place where armed men thought themselves ent.i.tled to resist coercion.

Dublin was the more dangerous because the war, which created so much employment in Great Britain, brought no new trade to Ireland, outside of Belfast. Agriculture prospered, but the towns knew only a rise of prices. Redmond began with high hopes, which Mr. Lloyd George fostered, of rapidly-developing munition works, which would at the close of hostilities leave the foundation for industrial communities. Here again, however, Redmond's representations were in vain. When the heavy extra tax on beer and spirits was levied by the first supplementary Budget, he opposed it angrily:

"You are doing some shipbuilding at Belfast, you are making a few explosives at Arklow, you are buying some woollen goods from some of the smaller manufacturers, but apart from that, the bulk of the hundreds of millions of borrowed money which you are spending on the war is being spent in England and in increasing the income of your country."

This tax on alcohol would curtail the most important urban industry of the South and West of Ireland, and he feared that it was the old story of crushing Ireland's trade under the wheel of British interests.

Here again Redmond could only plead with the Irish Government that they, in their turn, should plead with the Imperial authorities. He should have been able to act in his own right as the head of an Irish Ministry, knowing the importance of providing employment at such a time. He saw the need and how to meet it; but he had none of the resources of power.

As compared with the other men who occupied, in the public eye, a rank equivalent to his--with General Botha, for instance--he was like a commander of those Russian armies which had to take the field against Germans with sticks and pikes.

Yet power he had--power over the heart and mind of Ireland--the power which was given him by the response to his appeal. From January onwards the Sixteenth Division grew steadily and strongly. Recruiting began to get on a better basis. The appointment of Sir Hedley Le Bas in charge of this propaganda brought about a healthy change in methods. Appeals were used devised for Ireland, and not, as heretofore, simple replicas of the English article. Heart-breaking instances of stupidity were still of daily occurrence, but imagination and insight began to have some play; and there was no longer the complete separation which had existed between the effort of Redmond and his colleagues and the effort of men like Lord Meath. In January Willie Redmond was posted to his battalion, the 6th Royal Irish, at Fermoy, where the 47th Brigade had its headquarters. In his case, as in my own, there had been much avoidable and most undesirable delay; but his presence with the Division was worth an immense deal. There was delay also about his younger namesake, John Redmond's son--who was for a long time refused a commission in the Division in whose formation his father had played so great a part.

Naturally, trained speakers who had joined the Division were utilized for recruiting purposes. Willie Redmond did comparatively little of this work. It is no light job to take over command of a company, if you mean really to command it; and with him, from the moment he joined everything came second to his military duty. But private soldiers have a less exacting time, and there was scarcely one week of my three months in the 7th Leinsters in which I did not spend the Sat.u.r.day and Sunday on this business--generally in company with the most brilliant speaker, taking all in all, that I have ever heard. Kettle, then a lieutenant in the battalion, was wit, essayist, poet and orator: whether he was most a wit or most an orator might be argued for a night without conclusion; but as talker or as speaker he had few equals. He was the son of a veteran Nationalist, who had taken a lead in Parnell's day; but the farmer's son had become the most characteristic product of Ireland's capital, which, rich or poor, squalid or splendid, is a metropolis--a centre of many interests, a forcing-house of many ideas. Nothing in Ireland is less English than Dublin, and its tone differs from that of England in having active sympathy with the continental mind.

Kettle was always to some extent in revolt against the theories of the Gaelic League, which he thought tended to make Ireland insular morally as well as materially. He was a good European because he was a good Irishman; and because he was both, he was, though largely educated in Germany, a fierce partisan of France.

More than all this, he had seen with his own eyes the actual martyrdom of Belgium. Sent out by Redmond to purchase rifles, he was in the country when Antwerp was occupied, and he wrote with pa.s.sion of what he heard, of what he saw. Louvain to him was more than a mere name. All the Catholic in him, and all the Irish Catholic, for Ireland's a.s.sociation with Louvain was long and intimate, rose up in fury; he went through Ireland carrying the fiery cross.

Everywhere we went we had friendly and even enthusiastic audiences; the only place where I met any suggestion of hostility was at Killarney, and there it took the form of avoiding our meeting. We were cheered and encouraged--but we did not get many recruits, so to say, on the nail.

Yet they came, generally dribbling in afterwards. From one small meeting in county Waterford we came away badly disappointed, having thought an effect was made, yet we did not take a single man. I heard later that within the next fortnight thirty men from that parish had come in by ones and twos to sign on--but at a town several miles away. Local pressure, personal not political, was against us, especially that of the mothers; and there was a shyness about taking this plunge into the unknown.

One exception stands out, in my mind, unlike the general run of these gatherings. It was the first field day of our brigade, when, dressed in the khaki that had at last been served out, we mustered on the race-course at Fermoy, five thousand strong; and I went from the review to the train for Waterford. There was no mistaking the temper of Redmond's const.i.tuency; we got men there in hundreds, including a score or so of cadets--young men of education--for our special company of the Leinsters, which was filling up fast.

At that meeting we had one force with us which was not often active on our side. The Bishop of Waterford was strong for the war; the leading parish priest of the town took the chair and spoke straight and plain, while one of the Regulars, a Carmelite friar, made a speech which was among the most eloquent that I have ever listened to.