by Leon Uris
The train left Liverpool lightly guarded for an inland arsenal. It was cleanly derailed in the countryside, the engineer, crew and guards disposed of and the cars looted onto waiting teamster wagons. When the train had been picked clean it was dynamited to make it appear that it had been an accident. The arms haul was dumped into an abandoned mine and later moved to other defunct colliery pits. Publicity was kept to a minimum to cover the War Office's embarrassment. The train had been so totally destroyed it was never learned if the British knew of the missing guns or not.
"It was one of those rare occasions," Dan Sweeney said with that misshapen contortion of a smile, "we ever pulled anything off without entirely fucking it up.
"Our most urgent mission is to get those guns out of England, into Ireland, and dump them. Three or four years from now when the Brotherhood has grown into operational units the British will be on the alert for gun running At this moment, their guard is down. Now is the time to move the guns over and get them hidden on Irish soil. I want each of you to study your own local situation and come up with some kind of plan."
Long Dan picked up the pistol once more. "And don't ever forget what I told you about informers."
CHAPTER FIVE
We had no way to match British arms on a battlefield. Our weapons were the weapons of the conquered; a dogged ability to endure and preserve our culture, a sense of humor and, most of all, words. Never at a loss for words, we Irish laid down a barrage in the euphoria of the Gaelic revival.
This was the moment Dublin poured forth from Connolly's "Workers' Republic" to Arthur Griffith's United Irishman, named after the insurrection of a century before. Arthur Griffith had been in the Transvaal and returned with visions of glory. A legendary beauty of ascendancy stock, Maud Gonne, formed the Daughters of Ireland and tramped the countryside championing the peasants' cause as well as that of the slum dwellers. Young Irish Societies and Wolfe Tone Clubs spread like brush foes. In America, the Dan of the Gaels ended its hibernation.
On the political front the issue of Home Rule had been kept dormant for over a decade during the last charge of the Conservatives. John Redmond, inheritor of Parnell's Irish Party, had floundered. Sick of the ineptness, Arthur Griffith founded a new party, Sinn Fein, "Ourselves Alone."
At the moment, Sinn Fein was as weak as the fledgling Brotherhood, but many of the best brains were being drawn to it and it was becoming the central spokesman for republicanism. I had no doubt but that Sinn Fein was destined to carry out the war of words just as the Brotherhood would ultimately carry out the war of bullets.
In those throbbing days the inner core of the revival was declared in a manifesto above the signatures of William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory and a man named Edward Martyn.
"We propose to have performed in Dublin, in the spring of every year, certain Celtic and Irish plays, which, whatever be their degree of excellence, will be written with high ambition and so build up a Celtic and Irish school of dramatic literature. . .. We will show that Ireland is not the home of buffoonery and of easy sentiment, as it has been represented, but the home of an ancient idealism. We are confident of the support of all Irish people, who are weary of misrepresentation, in carrying out a work that is outside all the political questions that divide us."
And so our national theater was born, Irishmen doing what was best in them, giving us a prideful and powerful spokesman. The playwright against the Crown, the actor against the Crown's artillery and bayonets.
In the spring of 1905 my play, The Booley House, was presented in the Mechanics' Institute Theater on Abbey Street. It was respectfully received. Later the theater became known as the Abbey Theater, the national theater of Ireland, our finest achievement as a people.
The night after the opening, Conor Larkin was assigned by the Irish Republican Brotherhood to Belfast, the darkest corner of the country. He was ordered to live normally and steer clear of outward republican activities. He was to look things over, work up a comprehensive physical layout of the city, scour the bars, listen. Later he would contact a few solid old-line Fenians and search carefully for new ones, find safe houses and escape routes.
Most urgently, Conor was to see if Belfast offered a possible route to smuggle our guns in from England.
*
From my own years at Queen's College I came to know Belfast as a queer city on the Irish landscape. If there was a revival in the south, little of the impact reached that place. There was some weak activity on the labor front, and some publications such as the Shan Van Vocht (The Old Woman of Ireland), but for the most part there were few takers and the republican cause was engineered from hole-in-the-wall offices with little funds or resources.
For this was the heartland of the Protestant settlement. Counties Down and Antrim never did figure greatly in native Catholic habitation. When the Presbyterians settled as planters in 1600, Belfast was born from a swamp. Nearly all the early population came from Presbyterian farms in the two adjoining counties. Communal living and work sharing, an agrarian tradition brought into Belfast, tended to give the city more of a look of linked villages.
Landlordism moved into the city from the countryside and Lord Donegal became one of the great urban renters in the British Isles, fathering the future slums and setting the tone of red brick monotony. In the end he received his deserts by destituting himself on gambling debts.
By 1800 Belfast had entered the Industrial Revolution a half century late with a textile industry that vanguarded the most wretched squalor in the realm. The stink of Belfast's poor districts flowed in open sewers and erupted from piles of dunghills, tanner shops, home breweries and the ammoniated urine against walls of courtyards entered by six-foot-wide alleyways. Once inside, the defilement was locked in and air and light shut out. Families of a dozen or more huddled in abysmal hovels without water or sanitation. A few public bathhouses were inadequate to cope with the crush of filth. Open sores, matted hair and warped growth were part of the costume of the poor.
The looms boomed on with shattering relentlessness, first cotton, then linen, with labor supplied by women and children, for, like Derry, it was a city of female workers. As linen rose and fell in cycles of recession, boom and depression, the few pence a week was uncertain and thousands of spinners and weavers made off to America.
*
For the first two centuries there was no significant Catholic population in Belfast. When they first came, the liberal Scottish Presbyterians lived humanely with them. Catholics began to arrive in massive gulps on the heels of land evictions, rural unemployment, and in the wake of the famine, and attitudes changed forever.
Catholics settled in their own small "villages" around the heartbeat of a church. Their large numbers were neither welcome nor wanted. They arrived into an established order in which they shared no involvement and little voice. They were strangers in Belfast, invaders. As their numbers grew, Catholic "villages" linked up in the western part of the city and in other places became isolated enclaves. What was originally a series of communal settlements in Belfast matured into tribal pales of two hostile clans.
*
As the steam power loom exploded industrial growth the girth of Lough Belfast and the towns to the immediate south, hundreds of looms sprang up along the avenues of running water. With the collapse of cotton during the American Civil War, Belfast rocketed as the linen capital of the world.
By 1878 Frederick Weed had begun his monolithic shipyard along with others and for the first time thousands of men were put to work. They were Protestant nearly to a man, mostly from East Belfast and the Shankill, which became his personal fortresses.
The Belfast complex multiplied into industries of heavy machinery, armaments, rope making distilling, tobacco, flour milling, graving docks and a major shipping center.
Nothing then or ever again would keep the pall of industrial filth from putrefying the air around the lough. By 1870 the horror of it brought on commissions of inquiry which expressed grave concern that Belf
ast's air and water pollution were having a debilitating effect on the people. These alarms went unheeded, for nothing could stop the loom, the steam hammer and the riveter.
Protestant slums and the waterfront were bilges of crime and inhumanity. Catholic slums festered within whose bounds the law or even the clergy rarely cared to tread. Most vestiges of a Western civilization ceased. These slums were the frequent hosts to onslaughts of cholera and typhoid and had an incidence of tuberculosis hundreds of percentages greater than the rest of the kingdom. Uneducated, scurvy-ridden, social lepers and physical wrecks were left to wallow in squalor where morality had fled. Beggars, fever carts, workhouses, whores, pimps, stabbing, theft, starvation, madness, dope, alcohol were workaday. When there was no dogfight or cockfight to wager the last farthing on, mothers threw their scrawny sons into the pit to battle themselves bloody.
Beyond the ghettos, great block like uninspired Victorian edifices threw up a facade of grandeur to hide the putridity. Buildings for commerce, industry and government continued to bulk and along the sea fronts rose the manor houses of the world's newest gold coast.
*
Belfast's golden age of riots entered on the damnations of fire-breathing evangelists who kept the Protestant poor on razor's edge. Mammoth open-air meetings by the Reverend Messrs. Drew, Cooke, Hanna and their ilk burst into savage rioting in 1813, 1832, 1835, 1843, 1852, 1864, 1872, 1880, 1884, 1886 and 1898. Bloodletting in Belfast was no twentieth-century phenomenon. It was the poor being harangued to fight the poor, the tribal units of Protestants in Sandy Row, the Shankill and East Belfast bashing heads with the Catholic tribal units in the Falls, the Pound and Divis.
The structure of rule was an interlaced alliance of the Union Preservation Party, the Orange Order, and elements of the Protestant clergy. The purpose of rule, a continued manipulation of division of the laboring class with police and government apparatus entirely in their control.
*
Oliver Cromwell Maclvor, preceded by Drew, Cooke and Hanna, fit into this scheme as the most feared and fearsome preacher of them all. Now enshrined in his magnificent Savior's Church of the Shankill, he held enormous sway and power.
Heavily endowed by Frederick Weed, Maclvor keynoted the temper at the turn of the century. On his word, the Shankill could plunge into frenzy or despair or its feet could be set into a tempo of crusade like marching. He was the man to communicate from ruler to masses and his mission was clear. Maclvor was the keeper of the myth, the satirist on Christianity, for nowhere in the world did a two-hundred-year-old political deity, William of Orange, retain such infinite power. Maclvor was his spokesman beyond death.
To back up the Reverend Mr. Maclvor's spiritual might, Weed and Weed's cronies endowed him with practical might. As one of Belfast's leading Orangemen, Maclvor had hiring rights at the Weed Works and a number of factories and mills. Word from him could get a man a job or make him a social outcast. In his good hands, Sir Frederick kept things under remarkable control in the Shankill. Between Maxwell Swan and the Savior's Church of the Shankill, the ambition of men was dulled in the seeking of liberation from their industrial bondage. Maclvor and his eternal "Reformation" shut out culture and beauty and freedom of thought. The Savior's Church of the Shankill was the symbol and epitome of Ulsterism.
*
With the advent of the twentieth century, Belfast was a major factor in the British scheme, an industrial giant, a revenue maker which paid off for the loyal, the perfect colony which policed its own dissidents, with marginal prosperity for some and a windfall for the elite. Her trade and economy were tied to the fact she was a British city and any question of Irish Home Rule or republicanism brought reactions of fear and rage.
Belfast ran with her clock over two centuries behind time, a feudally contrived vessel in which the "disloyal" natives continued to be punished with a minuscule portion of wealth, work and power.
Separation of the working class was the principal canon in insuring the flow of wealth to the gentry and locking out progress and liberal thought.
Colonizers in Derry had established a walled fortress in an outpost surrounded by and in constant siege by hostile Catholics. Belfast was different. Belfast was deliberate. Belfast was born as the mongoloid child of British imperialism.
*
Conor Larkin had been told by his friend Andrew Ingram and again by Long Dan Sweeney he was destined to be a soldier in dubious battle. As he arrived in that gross identity of red brick, no place was more a battle site in dubious battle.
CHAPTER SIX
The Ardoyne was one of those small areas cut off from the main Catholic settlement in West Belfast surrounded by Protestant Woodvale, Cliftonville and the Shankill.
Conor left his digs, a room on Flax Street, and made down the Crumlin Road arterial. It was Saturday, pub night before the Lord's Day. Muscled numbers from the shipyards and others engaged in hard labor lined up deep at the bars, bulling down Guinness and talking in swift, clipped Belfastese. The language was tough. The humor was tough. Toughness was their trade mark, their badge of honor, their constant boast. Tough men sense and respect tough men and Conor walked the Crumlin line peacefully.
The New Lodge, a bit removed, held another Catholic enclave. Conor passed a Constabulary station girded for Saturday night warfare both on the borders and within the tribal pales, turned into Shandon Lane, stopping midway down a dingy line of oversized doll houses wearing eyebrows of white brick above the doors and windows. He knocked. He was let in without greeting into the room where Long Dan Sweeney looked up from a small, square wooden table. Long Dan raised the level of the lamplight as they spoke over a map of the city. Nothing much seemed to be happening, a drifting about the Catholic areas from pub to pub, church to church, a few quiet questions about an old "Brother" or known former sympathizer. Conor and his counterparts were like tiny cells floating about without definite shape, groping for points to solidify.
It was all buried in the minds of a few men. While the agitation and pressure of words made or missed their marks, those ultimate leaders in the Brotherhood glided about in the shadows. Conor had already learned that patience was the elixir of revolution. No prose could force a man with a full belly into the streets to rise, nor could any law stop a hungry man from taking to the streets. Long Dan Sweeney was in no hurry. Fiery miracles and self-deception had fled him long ago. He planned like a surgeon.
Catholic Belfast would ultimately become involved in some kind of street warfare. The Boer tactics were studied closely, for it would call for small mobile forces using the support of the Catholic population to tie up large numbers of conventional troops. Perhaps it wasn't in keeping with the mahogany-room rules but it was designed to equalize the odds and taunt and frustrate and wear thin the patience of a cumbersome military power.
How long? Two more elections, three, and maybe the Conservatives would be gone from power in England. There would be talk once more of a Home Rule Bill but faith in John Redmond and the Irish Party was low. Redmond would try. Redmond would fail. The people would start flocking to Arthur Griffith's Sinn Fein Party. One more crop failure, one more depression, one more deception by the British and men would start seeking out the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood would be ready, small but organized into concise units with concise plans.
Belfast was a mind bender. Long Dan grunted that the city was always a step away from madness. He knew things were difficult for Larkin. Everywhere else, in Cork, Dublin, Galway, out on the land, the population was overwhelmingly Catholic. The Brotherhood could always find someone sympathetic in a key position, and in a showdown most of the people would back them. Everything in Belfast was Protestant-controlled and ultra-British, the government, docks, transport, Constabulary, everything. By the time of a rising the Brotherhood would have developed some good fighting units from the festering Catholic slums but otherwise the population would be loyal to the Crown. The Brotherhood would be sorely put to find anyone in authority to play along.
; Long Dan folded the map along with the other information Conor had gathered without compliment or comment.
"I've a notion about smuggling the guns," Conor said.
Dan nodded.
"I'm after trying for a job in the Weed Works."
Long Dan frowned, puzzled. "There are less than two hundred Catholics inside the yard out of a work force of ten thousand men, so you've got about as much of a chance as a bottle of gin in a Tipperary pub. But even if you get in, what good will it do?"
"Private docks," Conor answered.
"Go on."
"I don't know how well the ports are guarded elsewhere in Ireland but here in Belfast it's tight. They've a heavy customs operation, almost Protestant to a man."
"It's like that everywhere," Sweeney said.
"The Weed Works has a private sort of setup. There's a constant flow of material and ships to and from England almost daily. There's almost no security and the few old timers in customs aren't checking much of anything. What I'm thinking is that the yard might be an unguarded back door. I don't know how, what, where, when or why, but I'd like to get inside and look around."
Long Dan's single frailty was an indulgence in tobacco. His face contorted with thought as it became engulfed in smoke. What an idea! Slipping guns right through the most powerful Protestant stronghold in all of Ireland, the Weed Ship & Iron Works. It was madness, yet with such sweet simplicity.
"It will do no harm to try," he said. "Of course you've figured out how you're going to get a job in there."
"Aye, I've a notion on that," Conor answered.
Sweeney's cynicism faded. "How's that?"
"An old friendship or two."
The mind of the ancient rebel chewed on it. He nodded. "Give it a go."
"Aye."
*
The season had been arduous for the East Belfast Boilermakers, heading in the general direction of disaster. After successive losses to Barley, the Rochdale Hornets and Wigan, manager Derek Crawford subsisted heavily on charcoal biscuits, Lavalle's Gout Mixture and a variety of patent medicines to contain chronic colitis. With more than a half dozen games yet to play in Belfast before the English Midlands tour, unhappy growls could be heard from Rathweed Hall clear down to the fans in the pubs.