John Redmond's Last Years Part 15

Our Division, or rather two brigades of it, had detrained in France on the 19th of December; the first impression as we shook ourselves together for the march to strange billets was the sound of guns.

Scattered about in different villages lying round Bethune, our battalions pa.s.sed the next two months in the usual training before we should take up our own sector of the line, and we saw little or nothing of each other. March found us engaged, though still only attached by companies to more seasoned troops, in some rough crater-fighting on the ugly mine-riddled stretch between Loos and Hulluch. It was when we were marching out from broken houses about the minehead at Annequin that we first met again our old stable companions, the Royal Irish--and that I first saw Willie Redmond in France at the head of his company.

He was on foot as always, for he never could be persuaded to ride while the men were marching, and I never saw more geniality of greeting on any countenance than was on his when he came up with outstretched hand to where I was sitting by the roadside--for we had halted to see them go by. Here was a man utterly in his element, radiant literally in the enthusiasm of his devotion. He refused to listen to our talk of the bad time we had been through in the place where they were to succeed us (and in two winters of that war I never saw worse); all his talk was of the good time which we should have in the billets we were going to, which they had just left. Back there, in and about Allouagne, they rejoined us; and I remember dining with him in his company mess and hearing his eulogies of the splendid fellows that his company officers were. Then, about the time we moved up into trenches, our first leaves began and he got home in March. Naturally, he looked in at the House of Commons, and realized for the first time how uneasy well-informed persons in the lobbies were about the chances of the war. Everybody who ever came home from the front must have experienced the effect of that strange transition from unquestioning confidence to worried anxiety; but Willie Redmond was the only man who ever adequately gave expression to it.

It was on the eve of St. Patrick's Day, and the Army Estimates were under discussion in a very thin House--a wrangling, fault-finding debate. In the middle of it Willie Redmond got up, and said that as he was not likely to be there again, he had one or two things to say which he thought the House would be glad to know. Speaking as one of the oldest members, who had all but completed his thirty-third year in Parliament, he told them that every soul in the House should be proud of the troops--not of the Irish troops, but of the troops generally--because more than anything else of the splendid spirit in which they were going through the privations and dangers,--which he described with pa.s.sion. If he were to deliver a message from the troops, he knew well what it would be:

"Send us out the reinforcements which are necessary, and which are naturally necessary. Send us out, as we admit you have been doing up to this, the necessary supplies, and when you do that, have trust in the men who are in the gap to conduct the war to the victory which everyone at the front is confident is bound to come.

'And when victory does come,' the message would run on, 'you in the House of Commons, in the country, and in every newspaper in the country, can spend the rest of your lives in discussing as to whether the victory has been won on proper lines or whether it has not.' Nothing in the world can depress the spirits of the men that I have seen at the front. I do not believe that there was ever enough Germans born into this world to depress them. If it were possible to depress them at all, it can only be done by pursuing a course of embittered controversy in this country--as to which was the right way or the wrong way of conducting affairs at the front.

When a man feels that his feet are freezing, when he is standing in heavy rain for a whole night with no shelter, and when next morning he tries to cook a piece of scanty food over the scanty flame of a brazier in the mud, he perhaps sits down for a few minutes in the day's dawn and takes up an old newspaper, and finds speeches and leading articles from time to time which tell him that apparently everything is going wrong, that the Ministers who are at the head of affairs in this country, upon whom he is depending, are not really men with their hearts in the work, but are really more or less callous and calculating mercenaries, who are not directing affairs in the best way, but are simply anxious to maintain their own salaries. I say that when speeches and articles of that kind are found in the newspapers they are calculated, if anything is or can be so calculated, to depress the men who are at the front."

Then came a few words in praise of the Irish troops and in deprecation of the failure to recognize some of their services; a confident a.s.surance that, "whether they are remembered or not," the Sixteenth Division would do their duty, with an equal a.s.surance that the Ulster men would do as well as they--and he reached to his conclusion:

"Since I went out there I found that the common salutation in all circ.u.mstances is one of cheer. If things go pretty well and the men are fairly comfortable, they say 'Cheer O!' If things go badly, and the snow falls and the rain comes through the roof of a billet in an impossible sort of cow-house, they say 'Cheer O!' still more.

All we want out there is that you shall adopt the same tone and say 'Cheer O!' to us."

It is not too much to say that this speech was received with a cry of grat.i.tude all over the country and throughout the Army. It said what badly needed to be said, and said it with a freshness and a dash that came superbly from a company commander in his fifty-fourth year. It was the best service that had yet been rendered to John Redmond's policy.

Everybody quite naturally and simply accepted the Nationalist Irishman as the spokesman for all the troops who were actually in the line. Mr.

Walter Long, always a generous and candid human being, was quick to give voice to this feeling:

"The honourable and gallant member for East Clare has been in conflict, not only with one particular political party, but during the greater part of his career with every party in turn, and has engaged in bitter controversy with them. Does anybody doubt the fact that when war was declared one great factor in the mind of the Emperor responsible for this war was that dissension would paralyse the hands of Great Britain? Ireland, whatever may have been our differences in the past, and whatever may be our differences in happier days again when we are at peace, everybody must feel by the action of her representatives, who have fought so bitterly in this House and in the country, has created a new claim for herself upon the affection, the grat.i.tude, the respect of the people of the Empire by the great and proud part that she has played in this great struggle."

That was the position to which Redmond's policy, backed by the Irishmen who supported it with their lives, of whom his brother was the outstanding representative, had brought this great issue. The next thing which brought the name of Ireland prominently before the world was the story of action taken by other Irishmen, also at the risk of their lives, to reverse the strong current which was then carrying us forward with so hopeful augury.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: Lieutenant-Colonel Maurice Moore, C.B., an officer who had served with distinction in South Africa, and whose father, George Henry Moore, had been a famous advocate in Parliament of Tenant Right and Repeal.]

[Footnote 6: Rifles were really not available, nor competent instructors. But the essential was recognition. A grant towards equipment should have been given, and possibly other a.s.sistance. We secured several thousand rifles in Belgium about this time. For instructors, any old crippled veterans paid by Government would have conveyed the sense of recognition.]

CHAPTER VII

THE REBELLION AND ITS SEQUEL

I

The facts of the Irish rebellion are too generally familiar to need more than the briefest restatement--and perhaps too little known for an attempt at detailed a.n.a.lysis. Broadly, a general parade of the Irish Volunteers all over the country was ordered for Easter Sunday. On the night before Good Friday a German ship with a cargo of rifles was off the Irish coast. This ship, the _Aud_, was a few hours later captured and taken in convoy by a British sloop, so that the arms were never landed. Emissaries from the Volunteers who had gone to Kerry by motor-car to receive and arrange for distributing the arms were killed in a motor accident while hurrying back to get in touch with their headquarters. On Sat.u.r.day the general parade was cancelled by order of Professor MacNeill, chief of the Volunteer organization. On Monday, against his wish, a portion of the Volunteer force in Dublin, including the battalion specially under command of Pea.r.s.e and MacDonagh, with the Citizen Army under James Connolly, paraded, scattered through the city and seized certain previously selected points, of which the most important was the Post Office. From it as headquarters they proclaimed an Irish Republic. Slight attempts at rising took place in county Wexford, where the town of Enniscorthy was seized, in county Galway, and in county Louth. At Galway, at Wexford and at Drogheda the National Volunteers turned out to a.s.sist in suppressing the rising. Except for a serious encounter with a police force in county Dublin, the fighting was confined to the capital. It terminated by the unconditional surrender of the rebels on the Sat.u.r.day. The struggle was prolonged by the total lack of artillery in the early stages. Riflemen established in houses could not be dislodged by direct a.s.sault of infantry without very heavy casualties to the attacking force.

The purpose of this book is to show Redmond's connection with this event and the succeeding developments from it. He failed to foresee the event; he failed to direct its developments into the course he desired. How far he is to be held responsible, or blameworthy, for these failures, readers may be a.s.sisted to decide.

From the beginning of 1916 onwards the Irish Government was warned of danger. One of its members--the Attorney-General, Sir James Campbell--advocated the seizure of arms from men parading with what were evidently stolen service rifles or bayonets. But the Chief Secretary refused to take any action which could be described as an attempt to suppress or disarm the Irish Volunteers until there was definite evidence of actual a.s.sociation with the enemy.

Proof of sympathy was not difficult to obtain, and the propaganda against recruiting had now reached the point of attempts to break up recruiting meetings. Still, Mr. Birrell was in a difficulty. He had a logical mind, and he knew what had been permitted to Ulster. The fact that the Attorney-General himself had been a main adviser of the Provisional Government did not make it easier to follow his advice to disarm men who professed disaffection to the existing authority. Mr.

Birrell knew that if he took such action he could be attacked in the official Nationalist Press for having one law in Ulster and another in the South. Further, Redmond would certainly not have disavowed, and might even have endorsed, such a line of criticism. The reason was that Redmond, as he had never believed in the reality of the Ulster danger, so now did not believe in this one.

Later, when Mr. Birrell resigned his post after the insurrection was suppressed, Redmond chivalrously took on himself a part of the responsibility. "I feel," he said, "that I have incurred some share of the blame which he has laid at his own door, because I entirely agreed with his view that the danger of an outbreak of the kind was not a real one, and in my conversations with him I have expressed that view, and for all I know that may have influenced him in his conduct and his management of Irish affairs." A later debate--on July 31st--showed that his strong personal feeling for Mr. Birrell had moved him rather to overstate than to belittle his advisory responsibility. Dublin Castle had never consulted him as to policy. Conferences had taken place with the Under-Secretary, Sir Matthew Nathan, but these were concerned with considering and framing the machinery to be created for bringing the Home Rule Act into operation, whenever the time came.

"There was no conference at all about the state of the country or about Sinn Fein. When once or twice in casual consultation the matter came up--I hope the House will listen to this--I did not hesitate to say what in my opinion ought to be done in certain cases by the Government. For example, I expressed a strong view to them as to how they should deal with seditious newspapers and with prosecutions. What I did suggest, they never did; what I said they ought not to do, they always did. And I want to say something further. They never gave me any information, bad or good, about the state of the country. From first to last I never saw one single confidential Government report from the police or from any other source. I know nothing whatever about their secret confidential information."

It is fair to add that the Under-Secretary was in communication from time to time with other members of the party, who were of course in touch with Redmond. But the substantial accuracy of Redmond's statement is sufficiently evidenced by one fact. Everybody knew that Sir Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt was in Berlin and had tried--most unsuccessfully--to recruit an Irish Brigade from among the Irish prisoners. But neither Redmond nor any Irish member knew that from April 17th Dublin Castle had warning that a ship was on its way from Germany with rifles. The Navy was on the alert, and when the _Aud_ came off Fenit, in Kerry, on Good Friday morning, she was promptly challenged.[7] But in the dark hours of that morning she had landed Sir Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt and his two confederates, one of whom was arrested with him the same day. On Sat.u.r.day morning Government decided to take action against what was now clearly a rebel organization. But as the Chief Secretary and the General Commanding in Chief were both in London, and as the available force of men in Dublin was small, a postponement was decided on. No special precautions appear to have been taken against the contingency of an immediate rising. On Monday a very large proportion of the officers from the Curragh and the Dublin garrison were at the Fairyhouse races. In the Castle itself there was only the ordinary guard.

Redmond at this date was also in London. His lack of apprehension is sufficiently indicated by the fact that his son and daughter were both at the races, and drove up unknowingly to an armed barricade. Had he been in authority and known, as the Government knew on Sat.u.r.day, that the Irish Volunteers expected and had arranged for the landing of a heavy cargo of arms on Good Friday, and that a general parade of their men had been ordered for Easter, I hope that he would have either had troops in the utmost readiness to move, or have put strong guards in places of importance. But this is a futile speculation, for had he been in power the situation would never have arisen.

The decisive thing which drove most of the relatively small number among the Volunteers who broke away from Redmond into their original hostility was Government's failure to recognize them. Their force stood in their own eyes for the a.s.sertion of Ireland's nationality; and many of those who took active part in the rebellion were at the outset fully prepared to a.s.sert that nationality in jeopardy of their lives in the Allied cause. Redmond's policy, had effect been given to it by the Government, still more had he himself been invested with the right to embody it in action, would have prevented the estrangement of all but a very few.

Once the estrangement took place, however, I think that he undervalued what was opposed to him, both in respect of its power and of its quality. He lacked appreciation and respect for the idealists whose ideals were not his own. He underrated their sincerity, and the danger of their sincerity. The beauty of sacrifice in the young men who went out to the war, carrying Ireland's cause in their keeping, moved him profoundly; and he saw the practical bearing of their acts on the great practical problem of statesmanship to which his life had been given. He did not guess at the sway which might be exercised over men's minds by an almost mystical belief which disdained to count with practicalities, Redmond for fifteen years had been the leader, and for thirty-five years had been a member, of a party which presented itself--with great justification--as the winner for Ireland of many positive material advantages on the way to an ultimate goal. Pea.r.s.e, at a time when all the world was plunged in a prodigal welter of destruction, came forward, demanding from Irishmen nothing but a sacrifice--promising nothing but the chance for young men to shed their blood sacramentally in the cause of Ireland's freedom. Redmond also was calling for the extreme risk, but on a sane and sound calculation, to ensure the full development of something already gained. Pea.r.s.e preached, mystically, the efficacious power simply of blood shed in the name of Ireland. Those whom he brought with him into the pa.s.s of danger were few, but they were touched with his own spirit; and even the very recklessness of their act touched the popular imagination. Irish regiments, after all, could do only what other regiments were doing; their deeds were obscured in a chaos of war from which individual prowess could not emerge. Pea.r.s.e and his a.s.sociates offered to Irishmen a stage for themselves on which they could and did secure full personal recognition--the complete attention of Ireland's mind.

All this would have seemed vanity to Redmond's solid, positive intelligence--vanity in all senses of the word. It would have moved him to nothing but angry contempt--anger against the spirit which was prepared to divide Ireland's effort, contempt for the futility of the reasoning. But one aspect of the rising dominated all the others in his mind. He had neither tolerance nor pity for Roger Cas.e.m.e.nt, who was in his eyes simply one who tried to seduce Irish troops by threats and bribes into treason to their salt, one who made himself among the worst instruments of Germany. At the re-a.s.sembly of Parliament on April 27th he expressed the "feeling of detestation and horror" with which he and his colleagues had regarded the events in Dublin; a feeling which he believed to be shared "by the overwhelming ma.s.s of the people of Ireland." On May 3rd, in a statement to the Press, he denounced fiercely "this wicked move" of men who "have tried to make Ireland the cat's-paw of Germany." "Germany plotted it, Germany organized it, Germany paid for it." The men who were Germany's agents "remained in the safe remoteness of American cities," while "misguided and insane young men in Ireland had risked, and some of them had lost, their lives in an insane anti-patriotic movement." It was anti-patriotic, he urged, because Ireland held to the choice she had made, to the opinion which thousands of Irish soldiers had sealed with their blood. It was "not half so much treason to the cause of the Allies as treason to the cause of Home Rule."

On the day when that statement appeared the sequel had begun to unroll itself. In the House of Commons Mr. Asquith announced the trial, sentence and shooting of three signatories to the Republican proclamation--Pea.r.s.e, Clarke and MacDonagh. With the exception of James Connolly, these were the men most directly answerable for launching an attempt which had cost five hundred lives and destroyed over two millions' worth of property, Redmond accepted their doom as just.

"This outbreak happily seems to be over. It has been dealt with with firmness, which was not only right, but it was the duty of the Government so to deal with it."

But now that example had been made, he held that other thoughts should guide those in authority.

"As the rebellion, or the outbreak, call it what you like, has been put down with firmness, I do beg the Government, and I speak from the very bottom of my heart and with all my earnestness, not to show undue hardship or severity to the great ma.s.ses of those who are implicated, on whose shoulders there lies a guilt far different from that which lies upon the instigators and promoters of the outbreak. Let them, in the name of G.o.d, not add this to the wretched, miserable memories of the Irish people, to be stored up perhaps for generations, but let them deal with it in such a spirit of leniency as was recently exhibited in South Africa by General Botha, and in that way pave the way to the possibility ... that out of the ashes of this miserable tragedy there may spring up something which will redound to the future happiness of Ireland and the future complete and absolute unity of this Empire. I beg of the Government, having put down this outbreak with firmness, to take only such action as will leave the least rankling bitterness in the minds of the Irish people, both in Ireland and elsewhere throughout the world."

It is well to recall what he had in his mind. After the suppression of the South African rebellion in 1914, one man only was put to death--an officer who changed sides during an action. No attempt was made to try accused persons before a jury; a special tribunal of judges was set up by the South African Parliament. But their power of inflicting punishment was limited by the Parliament to a sentence of three years.

General de Wet, the chief figure in the rebellion, was dismissed without punishment to his farm. That was the manner in which a strong native Government, realizing the possibilities of future trouble, dealt with an insurrection infinitely more serious in a military sense than that which broke out in Dublin. But in Ireland there was no native government; and the announcement of Mr. Birrell's resignation meant in reality that Mr.

Asquith's Ministry had abdicated so far as Ireland was concerned. Quite properly, they had called in a competent soldier to deal with the military exigency. Quite shamefully, they left him in sole authority to handle what was essentially the task of statesmanship.

Everybody saw that in such a case the need was to prevent a rebellious spirit from spreading. Sir John Maxwell took the simple view that the way to secure this was by plenty of executions. Knowledge of Irish history cannot be expected in an English Minister, still less in an English soldier; but it could have taught him how often and how ineffectually that recipe had been applied. Still less could it be hoped that a soldier, in no sense bound to the study of contemporary politics, should allow for the effect of two factors which must certainly influence Irish judgment and Irish feeling. The first of these was the precedent within the Empire created by General Botha's Government. This, I think, English opinion generally, and particularly English Imperialist opinion, wholly disregarded; but it was the point to which Redmond had instantly directed attention. For him, the idea of an Imperial Commonwealth of States was a reality, and within one Commonwealth there cannot be two standards of justice. The second factor was the licence accorded by a Liberal Government, and the sanction given by a Tory Opposition, to preparations for rebellion, and acts of rebellion, in Ulster. This was generally recognized by public opinion, though I think deliberately set aside by Sir John Maxwell--who perhaps is not to be blamed. But the Prime Minister, who had been chiefly and ultimately responsible for the decision to let Ulstermen do as they liked, was specially bound to consider and provide for the consequences of that line of policy in the past as it affected the present development. He was also, as the Minister responsible alike for carrying a Home Rule Act and for denying to it operation, specially bound in such a pa.s.s as this to be guided largely by the judgment of the man who but for that postponement would have been head of an Irish Government. But, under the various pressures of the moment, Mr. Asquith moved in a wholly different direction. Redmond's appeal and advice went totally disregarded. Yet Redmond knew Ireland as no Englishman could know it; and his hands were clean of guilt for what had happened. Mr. Asquith by his past inaction, his Tory colleagues by their action before the war, were deeply involved in responsibility. It is difficult, if not impossible, to find in Mr. Asquith's conduct any recognition of this cardinal fact. He judged rebels as if preparations for rebellion had never been palliated or approved.

All that Redmond could achieve was by incessant personal intervention to limit the list of executions, to put some stay on what he called later "the gross and panicky violence" with which measures of suppression were conceived and carried out. He could not prevent the amazing procedure of sending flying columns throughout the country into places where there had been no hint of disturbance, and making arrests by the hundred without reason given or evidence produced. In many cases, men who had been thoroughly disgusted by the outbreak found themselves in jail; and disaffection was manufactured hourly.

On May 3rd, when Redmond made his public appeal to Mr. Asquith, it was still not too late to prevent the mischief from spreading. By general consent, Redmond was right when he said that the rising was thoroughly unpopular in Ireland, and most of all in Dublin. The troops on whom the insurgents fired were in the first instance Irish troops. Later in that year I was attached to one of these battalions (the 10th Dublins), and asked them how they did their scouting work during the conflict. "We needed no scouts," was the answer; "the old women told us everything."

The first volley which met a company of this battalion killed an officer; he was so strongly Nationalist in his sympathy as to be almost a Sinn Feiner. Others had been active leaders in the Howth gun-running.

It was not merely a case of Irishmen firing on their fellow-countrymen: it was one section of the original Volunteers firing on another.

Yet from the moment when English troops came on the scene, another strain of feeling began to make itself felt. A lady ordered tea to be made for one of the incoming regiments, halted outside her house on the line of march. The refreshment was long in coming, and she went down to see why. She found her cook up in arms: "Is it me boil the kettle for Englishmen coming in to shoot down Irishmen?" Yet that was still the voice of a minority. When I came home from France a few weeks later, a shrewd and prosperous Nationalist man of business said to me with fury: "The fools! It was the first rebellion that ever had the country against it, and they turned the people round in a week."

Nothing could have prevented the halo of martyrdom from attaching itself to those who died by the law for the sake of Irish freedom: the tradition was too deeply ingrained in Ireland's history. Yet Redmond did not go beyond the measure of average Irish opinion when he accepted the first three executions as just. People at least knew who these men were, and their signatures to the proclamation of an Irish Republic proved their leadership. They were given the death of rebels in arms, to which no dishonour attaches. But a fatal mistake was made in suppressing all report of the proceedings of the court-martial on them, and this mistake was to be repeated indefinitely. Ireland was made to feel that this whole affair was taken completely out of the hands of Irishmen--that no attempt even was made to enlist Irish opinion on the side of law by a statement of the evidence on which law acted. Day by day there was a new bald announcement that such and such men had been shot; and these were men whose names Ireland at large had never heard of.

Then on top of all came the appalling admission that an officer suffering from insanity had taken out three prisoners and caused them to be shot without trial on his own responsibility, none of these men having any complicity with the rebellion. This incident would have inflamed public opinion in any community; in Ireland its effect was beyond words poisonous. It revived the atmosphere of the Bachelor's Walk incident; and there was only too much justification for holding that the military authorities were indisposed to take the proper disciplinary action. Its effect detracted from the excellent opinion which the troops generally had earned by their conduct: it instilled venom into the resentment of those few cases (and it was beyond hope that they should not occur) in which soldiers had either lost their heads or yielded to the temptation of revenge in its ugliest shapes.

The result can be best expressed by recording the experience of one Sinn Feiner who was captured in the fighting. While the military escort was taking him through the streets to his place of confinement, a crowd gathered round and ran along, consisting of angry men and women who had seen bloodshed and known hunger during these days. They shouted to the soldiers to knock his brains out there and then. Three weeks later he was again marched through the streets on his way to an English prison, and again a crowd mustered. But this time, to his amazement, they were shouting: "G.o.d save you! G.o.d have pity on you! Keep your heart up!

Ireland's not dead yet!"

These were the effects produced in Ireland on the mind of common people by the action of Government in enforcing the ultimate sanction of law which the members of that same Government by their action and by their inaction had brought into contempt. In England, in the meanwhile, a new Military Service Bill was going through the House, and naturally attempts to include Ireland in its operation were renewed. Sir Edward Carson, criticizing the Government of Ireland, said that (as Redmond put it in replying) Nationalists had held the power but not the responsibility. There was a note of angry protest in the Irish Leader's rejoinder. "I wish to say for myself that certainly since the Coalition Government came into operation, and before it, but certainly since then, I have had no power in the Government of Ireland. All my opinions have been overborne. My suggestions have been rejected, and my profound conviction is that if we had had the power and the responsibility for the Government of our country during the past two years, recent occurrences in Ireland would never have taken place."

I think that view was at that moment very generally shared in England.

The British Press had shown by their att.i.tude towards the events in Dublin how deeply Redmond had made his mark. Almost without exception Unionist papers refrained from any attempt to identify Nationalist Ireland generally with the rising: they did full justice to the valour and the sufferings of Irish troops--who, indeed, at that very moment were pa.s.sing through a cruel ordeal. In that Easter week the Sixteenth Division was subjected to two attacks with poison gas of a concentration and violence till then unknown, and under weather conditions which prolonged the ordeal beyond endurance. The 48th and 49th Brigades had very terrible losses. We of the 47th relieved them in the line.

That was a long tour of trenches, some eighteen days beginning on the 29th of April, and throughout it papers came in with the Irish news. I shall never forget the men's indignation. They felt they had been stabbed in the back. For myself, I thought that a situation had arisen in which Irish members who were serving had a more imperative duty at home, and I went to discuss the matter with Willie Redmond, whose battalion was then holding the front line to the left of Loos.

I found him in the deep company commander's dug-out in the bay of line opposite Puits 14 bis, which will be known to many Irish soldiers. We came up to the light to talk, and he agreed with me in my view. We arranged that each of us should discuss with his commanding officer the question of asking for special leave. Mine advised me to go, and I have no earthly doubt that his would have said, or did say, the same; but Willie Redmond never brought himself to leave his men. Next month, however, he was invalided back, very seriously ill.