“Oh, Henry, it’s going to be a lot more than just ‘the excitement!’
He replied somberly, “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”
President Roosevelt issued a declaration of American neutrality similar to that issued by Woodrow Wilson at the start of the Great War.
How could the Americans, safe in the embrace of two broad oceans, begin to understand what was happening to the Old World from which the New had been born?
The big Cadbury factory at Birmingham, England, covered itself with camouflage netting to fool German bombers, gave up the manufacture of chocolate, and concentrated on making gas masks. Thirty-eight million gas masks were issued to the British people.
Éire would not be dispensing gas masks. “The simple truth,” as Ursula wrote to Henry, “is that the nation lacks the ability to manufacture them. We still have so little in the way of industry. If Ireland gets sucked into this war, we do not have sufficient armaments to defend ourselves against invasion. For a long time I was furious with de Valera, but I am forced to acknowledge his foresight in insisting upon Irish neutrality. It is our only protection.”
I keep having to rethink, she told herself as she sealed the envelope. Once I believed the League of Nations was a fortress. But it has no more solidity than clouds that resemble mountains.
Geneva was going about its business normally—except people were walking more briskly than usual, and French, the predominate language, was spoken even more quickly than usual. Shops sold out of basic staples almost as soon as they arrived.
The Irish newspapers that arrived in Seán Lester’s office carried stern government warnings that stressed the unfairness of hoarding food, petrol, and other necessaries. The government also announced a new agricultural scheme to assure there would be enough grain and vegetables for the nation. Twelve and a half percent of all holdings over ten acres would have to be made available for tillage.
In November the Russians invaded Finland. Too little and too late, Britain agreed to send arms to defend the tiny nation.
The ax committee was taking up most of Lester’s time. He was clearly exhausted. Early in December he fell ill and attended the Assembly with a raging fever. “As soon as I feel a bit better, I’m going back to Ireland for Christmas,” he told Ursula. “Will you come?”
“It’s too soon for us,” she said.
Shortly before Christmas, Geraldine Dillon wrote from Ireland, “The newspapers are calling this ‘the Terrible Winter.’ We have dreadful ice and a black wind howling like a damned soul. The priests say it is God’s punishment on us, but I do not know what we did wrong.”
On Christmas Eve Ursula took Barry for a sleigh ride. Tourists were in short supply; the beautifully decorated sleighs drawn up in front of the luxury hotels along the Rive Droit were doing little business. One had a dapple-gray horse in the shafts. He turned his head toward Ursula as she approached and gave her a long look from between his blinkers.
She held Barry up to stroke the animal’s soft nose. The baby reached out fearlessly, his eyes sparkling.
“Horse,” Ursula told him.
He wriggled in her arms and made a quizzical sound.
“Horse,” she repeated.
“Oorse,” Barry said clearly.
Ursula laughed with delight. “Oh, my little man!”
The driver tucked a heavy rug around his passengers to keep them warm and they set off with a jingle of sleigh bells. The air was crystalline with cold, the runners hissed over hard-packed snow. The steady rhythm of hoofbeats was music to Ursula’s ears. “I used to have a horse,” she told the child on her lap. “A gray horse very much like this one.”
“Oorse,” said Barry again.
When Seán Lester returned to Geneva from his holiday in Ireland he did not look rested. “On the way out it took me four days just to get to London,” he told Ursula. “Civilian travel between England and Ireland will be suspended any day now. Members of the diplomatic corps will be given travel permits, of course, and so will accredited journalists. But that’s all. Transport has to be kept available for the troops.”
“British troops,” said Ursula. “Remember that Éire’s neutral.”
“I expect many Irishmen will be joining British regiments.”
She bristled with indignation. “How can they?”
Lester replied, “How can they not, under the circumstances?”
The Finnish army was making an astonishingly brave stand against the Russians in sub-zero weather. Ursula read the latest communiqué from Reuters aloud to Barry. Dressed in a bright red snowsuit, her son was sitting on the floor beside her desk, playing with a nest of Chinese boxes the Lesters had given him. He did not understand many of the words his mother spoke, but he looked up and gave her a toothless grin.
“Are you listening to the wireless?” Seán Lester asked from the doorway.
“Not yet, I was just—”
“Turn it on. There’s something I want you to hear.”
“What frequency?”
“Here, I’ll get it for you.”
Lester rotated the dial until, over the crackle of static, a nasal voice filled the room. “Germany calling! Germany calling!”
“Who on earth is that, Seán?”
“Fellow’s name is William Joyce, but he’s known as Lord Haw-Haw. When you hear the way he talks you can understand why. He’s broadcasting Nazi propaganda from somewhere in Germany.”
“He doesn’t sound German.”
“He’s not, I’m sorry to say. He grew up in Galway.”
She stared at Lester. “I don’t believe it.”
“It’s true. His father was a naturalized U.S. citizen and Joyce was born in America, but he’s spent most of his life in either Ireland or England. I just received a dossier on him from London. According to the information they have, he served as an informer for the Black and Tans and hates Irish Republicans. In England he got involved with Oswald Mosley’s British Fascist organization and somehow obtained a British passport. Last August he went to Germany and offered his services to Josef Goebbels’s Nazi propaganda ministry. Now he’s Hitler’s Irishman.”
The sneering, supercilious tones of Lord Haw-Haw burrowed like worms into Ursula’s brain. She was no longer neutral. “Damn the man and all he stands for!” she exploded.
According to the Irish Times, the outbreak of war witnessed an increased surveillance of the IRA and a growing number of confrontations between them and gardai. In January 1940 a garda detective was fatally shot while trying to arrest Thomas MacCurtain, son of the Cork lord mayor murdered during the War of Independence. The government responded by introducing amendments to the Emergency Powers Bill and the Offences Against the State Bill specifically designed to facilitate the arrest and internment of members of the Irish Republican Army.
A British army camp in County Down was raided on the eleventh of February. The camp had so often been raided by the IRA to replenish their weapon supplies that it was known among Republicans as “the stores.”
In Dublin’s Mountjoy Jail a number of IRA prisoners went on hunger strike to protest the conditions under which they were kept. In the past the Irish government, recalling the agonizing martyrdom of Terence MacSwiney in a British prison, had given in to hunger strikers. This time de Valera let two men die. The strike was called off.3
When Ursula read about it in the Dublin papers she could hardly control her anger. “The rotten bastard!” she exploded. “The IRA put de Valera where he is today! How can he do that?”
“It’s simply a different sort of war,” Seán Lester told her. But she was not mollified.
In March of 1940 the savage Russo-Finnish War finally ended. The peace treaty surrendered a large part of Finland to Russia, but it would prove to be a Pyrrhic victory. Stalin’s purges during the thirties had emasculated his officer corps. As a result the Red Army had taken a frightful drubbing from the Finns for most of the war. Russia’s military weaknesses were exposed to the world.
And
particularly to Adolf Hitler.
With inexorable force Hitler’s armies swept across Europe, invading the very countries that Joseph Avenol had hoped to combine into an all-European league. Denmark was overcome. British and French forces had joined the battle for Norway but the outlook was bleak. Belgium and the Netherlands expected to be next.
American journalists returning home from Europe were convinced Hitler would win.
Avenol felt the League of Nations should remove itself to France. “In order to save the Swiss government the embarrassment of being pressured by the Germans,” as he explained in the Assembly. He even took the step of sending League archives to the quiet little spa town of Vichy.
A few days later he ordered Lester to France to bring them back. “The secretary-general received more opposition to the arrangement than he bargained for,” Lester told Ursula. His eyes glinted with gentle malice. “Not everyone wants the League to become a French club.”
Lester selected two male members of staff to accompany him to France. When they returned laden with file boxes, Ursula was seconded to help restore the archives to proper order.
Behind the scenes, the political infighting at the League continued.
In Éire a ramshackle old army camp on the Curragh of Kildare was assigned to hold IRA internees who had not been tried for any crime, but were being held as members of an illegal organization.
Curragh Camp was also the main camp for the regular army.
Louise wrote to Ursula, “We know there is a war on, but it really does not seem to have much to do with us. I think most Irish people feel the same. We have had enough of war in this country, we do not want to think about another one.”
“God keep you,” Ursula murmured as she read those words. “I hope you never have to.”
The Lesters were a devoted couple. In spite of Seán’s natural reserve, it was apparent to Ursula that he was very lonely without his wife. One morning she entered his office to find him staring at a photograph of Elsie on his desk. “You miss her very much, don’t you?” Ursula said softly.
“Is it so obvious?”
“Down the country we would say it sticks out like horns on a pig.”
Lester burst out laughing.
Ursula was not surprised when Elsie Lester arrived in Geneva at the end of April to visit her husband. The happiness of their reunion was somewhat marred by the general atmosphere. At the headquarters of the International Red Cross there was frantic activity, but elsewhere in Geneva a sort of paralysis had set in. People were waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Lester brought Elsie to the secretariat for a brief visit with old friends, after which they invited Ursula and her son to join them in Lester’s private office for a quiet cup of tea. Barry amused himself by investigating the bottom drawers of Lester’s desk. Ursula sought news of home.
“There are a lot of rumors about spies going around,” Elsie reported.
“At least some of them are true,” her husband said. “Eire’s neutrality, added to her geographical location, makes her particularly attractive. The Washington Evening Star has even reported that Galway’s being used as a U-boat base,4 though I suspect that’s a story leaked by the British to discredit Éire in American eyes. Churchill’s furious over our neutrality.
“But I have no doubt there are people spying for Germany along the Irish coasts, both north and south. Now that the lads have returned from Spain, the IRA will want to take up the cudgel against the ancient enemy. How best to do that than by helping Germany? Remember the old axiom: ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend.’”
Ursula said hotly, “Surely you can’t think the IRA would…”
“I didn’t say they all would. But a few of them, undoubtedly. And they’ll believe they’re doing the right thing.”
Ursula started to say something else but was distracted by Barry. “Put that stapler back in the drawer,” she said sharply. “It isn’t a toy.”
Elsie reached out to rumple the little boy’s silky hair. “He doesn’t know what a stapler is.”
“He’ll learn the hard way if he staples his feet with it.”
“That’s how children always learn,” Elsie warned her. “The hard way.”
Aware that he had touched a nerve with Ursula, Lester changed the subject—slightly. “The Americans have spies in Ireland too,” he said to his wife. “They’re well-placed and report only to Washington, but they send their intelligence through London.”5
“How can you be so certain?”
“Oh, my sweet, this is the diplomatic service, remember? Everyone knows everything. War or no war, cable service from Dublin to the Continent remains available to German diplomats. Of course it goes through England. In return the Germans are allowing the cable link from Switzerland to England to stay open. We’re all busy deciphering messages and spying on one another. Espionage is a growth industry.”
Elsie had planned to stay for a month, but at Lester’s insistence the date of her return to Ireland was moved forward. Then moved forward again.
Meanwhile, the Irish Times reported that Aer Lingus was awaiting delivery of its first Douglas DC-3. The plane had been prepared by Fokker in Amsterdam and flown out of the Netherlands under the very noses of the invading German army.6
On Thursday morning, the ninth of May, Lester called Ursula into his office and closed the door. “You realize we’re in the middle of both a Swiss crisis and a crisis in the secretariat,” he said. “Six weeks ago I begged the secretary-general to let me make plans for a possible evacuation. Between our two offices we still have several hundred people, many of them women like yourself, with families.
“Avenol pooh-poohed it. He claimed adequate preparations were already made. When I told him no preparations had been made he gave a Gallic shrug and said that we must then share the fate of the Swiss people.”7 Lester looked thoroughly disgusted. “Whatever about that, yesterday afternoon I got return visas for Elsie. She’ll go home Sunday, or Monday at the latest.”
“Will you go with her?”
“My place is here. Whatever’s coming, the League…” Lester broke off, unable to finish the thought.
He means the League, or something life it, will be very much needed. Brave men and women will have to keep it functioning while this thing runs its course, and try to rebuild when the war ends. However the war ends.
Ursula’s heart leaped at the challenge.
Lester glanced at the photograph on his desk. “I’m going to take tomorrow afternoon off. Before she leaves, Elsie and I are going to have a picnic in the Versoix and I’ll try to get in a spot of fishing.”
That night Ursula went to bed fully prepared to stand shoulder to shoulder with Lester and the others at League headquarters who would be making a stand, however futile, for democracy.
She awoke in the dark. Barry was not yet awake; she could hear his soft baby snore as he lay beside her in the bed. The room retained warmth from the night before. The only sounds from the street were trucks making predawn deliveries.
She could go back to sleep for at least another hour.
Instead she sat up in bed and threw back the covers.
The Irish in her did not trust the machineries of logic, in whose name so many terrible deeds were done. Life’s truly great decisions should not be made cognitively. When it mattered most, Ursula Halloran relied on an intuitive certainty that occasionally rose within her like a rainbowed bubble, breaking the surface of a dark pool.
The bubble rose. And she knew.
Ursula was among the first staffers to arrive at the secretariat that morning, but the tension was already palpable. Neville Chamberlain had resigned; later in the day Winston Churchill would be sworn in as the prime minister of Britain. A fresh crisis awaited him.
Before dawn the Germans had invaded Belgium and Holland.
The Dutch queen Wilhelmina delivered a stirring speech, urging her people to take up arms against the enemy. She ordered the Dutch merchant fleet to be placed at t
he disposal of the British, and made certain that the nation’s gold reserves were taken aboard British warships. Then she and her family prepared themselves to depart for London, and exile.
When Seán Lester came in he found Ursula waiting for him with the news. He promptly telephoned Elsie to pack. “If you don’t go now,” Ursula heard him warn his wife, “you could be separated from the children for months. I’ll have to keep you here because soon it won’t be possible to travel.”
When he hung up the phone Ursula said, “Can you get travel visas for Barry and me too?”
While she waited they received news of German attacks on French aerodromes.
Reluctantly, Ursula left her beloved books behind. Lester promised they would be stored safely at the League. “You can retrieve them afterwards,” he assured her.
Her one suitcase was stuffed with clothing, Barry’s toys, and Saoirse’s bridle. The Mauser was concealed among her underthings. If for any reason they were searched along the way, female lingerie might go unprobed. She had to sit on the case to make it close.
The envelope from under the mattress was not in her suitcase, nor in her handbag. Ursula remembered what war was like. Before leaving her room for the last time, she padded her figure with cash pinned to her undergarments.
On Saturday night she and Barry left Geneva with Elsie Lester. Because Europe’s skies were no longer safe, they planned to take the train to Boulogne and cross the Channel on a passenger steamer, then fly to Ireland from London.
Ursula tried not to think about the boat journey.
Elsie was courageously cheerful. Dressed in powder blue with a new hat to match, she looked as gay as if she were going on the canceled picnic. But obviously it was not going to be a picnic. The train was packed. Every seat was taken. The passengers were, for the most part, tense and quiet. Many had brought an excessive amount of baggage. The areas around the doors were piled high, making it difficult to enter.
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