1921

by Morgan Llywelyn

  At first all Síle felt was the force of the blow, like being kicked in the belly. She looked down in disbelief to see steel plunging into her midsection. Then everything inside her stopped at once. Frozen. Skewered on icy hot steel, on burning cold steel. She could not breathe. The meat cleaver fell from fingers gone numb.

  After that came the pain. Pain beyond imagining, tearing her in half.

  Síle writhed on the bayonet, trying to turn and look back. “Precious…”

  Her mouth filled with blood.

  The man shouted at her, “Gor blimey, ya stupid bint, wotcha do that fer? Wotcha hafta go and do that fer? I ain’t never kilt no woman before.”

  Her slumping body was a dead weight on his blade. He tried to shake it off. When that failed he lowered her to the ground and braced his foot against her belly so he could pull the bayonet free. “She made me do it—she come at me with a cleaver!” he protested to anyone who would listen.

  No one did.

  HENRY returned very late to number 16. He was in a buoyant mood, a rainbowed soap-bubble of a mood. He did not want to talk to anyone for fear a pinprick might explode his joy, so he went straight to bed. He hardly slept. He could not remember when he had felt so flooded with energy. By morning he was up and dressed and out of the house without seeing anyone.

  Recalling Tom Barry’s description of the torture of Hales and Harte, he was worried about young Kevin Barry. The best source for information would be one of Michael Collins’ agents. It was still early enough to catch Ned Broy before he went to work in Dublin Castle, so Henry walked to a coffee shop he knew Broy frequented on his way to work. Accidental meetings in informal surroundings were always safest. Besides, it gave Henry the opportunity for a hot breakfast.

  He was just beginning his meal when Broy appeared. Like all men recruited for the Dublin Metropolitan Police force, Broy was broad-shouldered and muscular, standing well over six feet tall. Added to this he had trained himself to show no expression, no matter what happened. Some said this unnerving impassivity was his most effective weapon. When he recognized Henry, Broy greeted the journalist with the faintest of nods, then took a seat at an adjacent table so the two could talk across the backs of their chairs.

  “You know anything about the arrest of a lad called Kevin Barry?” Henry asked out of the side of his mouth as he pretended to devote himself to buttering a scone.

  “Heard something yesterday,” Broy muttered. “Involved in an IRA attack on a party from the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment. Two soldiers dead, one probably dying.”

  “Where are they holding Barry?”

  “Dunno, but I’ll find out when I go to the Castle. Won’t be until this afternoon, though. First there’s this Balbriggan business.”

  Henry put down his scone. “What Balbriggan business?”

  “Last night a hundred and fifty Black and Tans from the military depot at Gormanstown sacked Balbriggan. They destroyed forty-nine houses, four pubs, and the stocking factory. At least two civilians were killed. I’m supposed to—”

  Henry was running for the door.

  He reached number 16 as a member of the DMP was leaving. The policeman had taken off his helmet and was carrying it under his arm.

  Henry brushed past him. Ned Halloran was standing in the hall, his face as empty as a sheet of blank paper. “What’s happened?” Henry grabbed his friend by the shoulders. “I just heard about Balbriggan—tell me what’s happened!”

  Ned’s mouth worked, but no sound came out.

  “Were they hurt? Look at me, Ned!” Henry’s clutching fingers bit so deep they reached the far place to which his friend had retreated.

  Ned’s green eyes slowly focused. In their depths Henry saw the signposts of his own heart obliterated.

  No. God no.

  In a voice of ashes Ned whispered, “Dead.”

  Unsay it. Unsay that word. “I don’t believe you.” Shock rolled over Henry. “There must be some mistake. Not Síle! Not Precious!”

  “Precious,” Ned echoed hollowly.

  Don’t tell me, don’t make it real, I can’t stand this.

  “She…woke up with a cold yesterday. We made her stay here. She was so…angry…” Ned swallowed hard. When he spoke again, it was one long ascending moan. “It’s Síle, Henry. Sweet Christ, they’ve killed my Síle!”

  This time the undertakers were real.

  LOUISE draped all the mirrors with black crepe and stopped all the clocks. Time itself had stopped at number 16.

  Ned asked Father O’Flanagan to conduct the funeral service. “My wife was a dedicated Republican,” he told the priest who was also vice-president of Sinn Féin. “She fought with Countess Markievicz in Stephen’s Green and she nursed the wounded in the GPO.” These were the credits that mattered. Nothing else needed to be said.

  REQUIEM Mass in the gloom and glamour of the Pro-Cathedral, a stone’s throw from the General Post Office. Familiar faces and strangers. Louise sniffling into her handkerchief. Father O’Flanagan attributing more glory to the deceased than she had ever known in her lifetime.

  In a driving rainstorm they buried Síle Duffy Halloran in Glasnevin Cemetery. A Republican honor guard. The coffin draped in an Irish tricolor. Michael Collins among the mourners at graveside, with his bared head bowed.

  Ned would not let anyone stand close to him. Would not let anyone comfort him. His grief was as scorching as his passion had been and could not be shared. He clung to a strip of sanity as thin as the rind pared from a cheese. On either side of that strip was a howling void. The easy thing would be to turn loose and tumble down, in madness forgetting. Forgetting the death of those days that were never to be. The aborted future.

  Laid in the grave with Síle.

  IF only I still had the comfort of faith, Henry was thinking. When I was a little boy I was sure I’d meet my father again in heaven.

  But he had gone from devoted to diverted, and did not know how to find his way back.

  THE gravediggers were throwing down hay to deaden the sound of falling earth when it was shoveled back into the grave.

  Precious stood beside Henry, clinging tightly to his hand as the first clods went down. “I’m not going to cry, Uncle Henry,” she said in a hoarse whisper. “My mama was very brave and I’m going to be brave too.”

  It was Henry who wept.

  LATER he wrote to his sister Alice in the convent and asked her to pray, to a God Henry was no longer sure he even believed in, for the soul of a woman she had never known. “Síle was a good person, a much better person than she ever knew,” he explained. “Ask God not to judge her harshly. Her faults were those of desperation and we are all desperate, one way or another.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  THE sacking of Balbriggan made international news. Photographs taken of the destruction—the roofless houses, the smoldering ruins—horrified people far from the shores of Ireland. The village was described as “looking like a Belgian town that had been wrecked by the Germans in the war” by no less a personage than Herbert Asquith, former prime minister of Great Britain.1

  A number of Republican prisoners were quietly transferred—or released—from Cork Jail. Henry captioned his article: “The Government’s Guilty Conscience.”

  But eleven hunger strikers remained within the grim prison walls—and one in Brixton Prison.

  On the twenty-first of September an IRA flying column ambushed five Black and Tans in West Clare and left them lying dead in the road. In reprisal the Tans attacked nearby Ennistymon and Milltown Malbay. The first person they shot to death was an old man driving a haycart. Next they shot a young schoolteacher, then a twelve-year-old boy who was carrying water to put out the fire destroying his house. The rampage finally ended hours later at Lahinch, where the terrified citizenry took to the fields as their town hall and homes were burnt to the ground.

  In an interview given to members of the American press, General Macready remarked that it was “only natural” that men under his
command should act on their own initiative.2

  On the twenty-second an unarmed civilian registered as John A. Lynch of Killmallock on the registry of the Royal Exchange Hotel, Dublin, was shot dead by members of the RIC as he lay in his bed. There was speculation that he had been mistaken for Liam Lynch, who was now commander of the Southern Division of the IRA.

  A few days later Republicans stormed the police barracks at Trim, in County Meath, and seized its store of weapons. Two hundred Tans and Auxiliaries retaliated by sacking the town.

  On the twenty-eighth Liam Lynch and Ernie O’Malley led an IRA raid on the military barracks at Mallow, which they captured. In reprisal Crown forces sacked the town.

  People in Ireland began bitterly referring to the conflict as the Tan War.

  Even the English press was horrified. The London Times spoke for many: “The accounts of arson and destruction must fill English readers with a sense of shame. The name of England is being sullied throughout the empire and throughout the world by this savagery.”3

  “I could show them real savagery,” Henry said to Louise. “Ned Halloran. God help anyone who crosses him now.”

  Ned went to Michael Collins and demanded to join the squad. Collins refused. Ned returned to number 16 in a towering rage. “Mick’s not discriminating against you,” Henry tried to tell him. “It’s just that you’re out for revenge and he won’t allow it.”

  “Will he not, the bloody hypocrite!” Ned slammed his fist against the wall so hard the sound reverberated through the house. He did not feel the pain. “He avenged Tom Clarke and Seán MacDermott!”

  “That’s different,” Henry said. Knowing it was not.

  Ned hit the wall again, harder.

  Henry laid a restraining hand on his arm. “Please, Ned, we’re all grieving.”

  Ned whirled away. For a moment Henry thought he would hit him, so livid and furious was the face he turned on his friend. “You don’t know anything about it!” he cried.

  Don’t I?

  For Ned Halloran there was only one loss: his. He clutched his grief to his heart like a trophy and refused to acknowledge anyone else’s pain. He began avoiding number 16, leaving without explanation and returning at all hours, sometimes filthy, sometimes with a split lip or a bloody nose.

  One night in the Oval Bar Henry confided to Matt Nugent, “I’m afraid Ned’s going to get himself killed.”

  “Nobody can stop him if that’s what he really wants to do. Give him time, though, and he’ll come to terms with it.” Nugent gave Henry a searching look. “You will too.”

  “What d’ye mean by that?”

  “You were fond of her yourself, weren’t you?”

  “I was,” said Henry, his mind retreating to a middle distance. “Fond of her.”

  A member of the British parliament wrote a letter to the London Times in which he suggested a truce with Ireland, unhampered by any preliminary conditions, to be followed immediately by a conference between representatives of the British government and Dáil Éireann.

  General Macready expressed himself as unalterably opposed. Martial law, he insisted, was the only way to solve the Irish problem. “The civil authorities must be prepared to shoot down rebels like the mad dogs they are.”

  “There is no Irish problem,” Henry angrily wrote in the Bulletin. “Only an English problem.”

  THE Dublin Metropolitan Police force was composed of Irishmen. Many of them were dismayed at being ordered to shoot other Irishmen. An emissary was sent to Sinn Féin asking for a guarantee that policemen would not be shot if they stopped carrying guns. Michael Collins agreed, with the added proviso that the police must no longer support military raids. From October the DMP ceased to be active against Republicans.4

  CIRCULATION of the Irish Bulletin had increased to six hundred, forcing the purchase of the long-desired new rotary duplicating machine. Desmond FitzGerald and Kathleen MacKenna went to purchase the contraption at Gestetner’s, and Joe Hyland delivered it to the Bulletin office in his taxi.

  More staff was needed, too. Kathleen MacGilligan was employed for dispatch work, and a young woman called Sheila Murphy to help with the statistics. Someone said she was one of the Big Fellow’s girlfriends; someone else said that could apply to half the women in Dublin.

  Collins, however, was seeing more of Kitty Kiernan than of anyone else, as Henry very well knew. When he spoke of her there was a tone in his voice that Henry recognized.

  ON the night of October eleventh Dan Breen and Seán Treacy were just falling asleep in a Republican safe house. Suddenly there was a crash of glass. British soldiers burst into the room. “The damned Castle spies had found us at last,” Breen told Henry later. “But we fought our way out, though we had to kill some soldiers to do it. Next thing I knew I was running barefoot through Dublin, half-blinded by blood pouring from a wound in my head. I thought Seán had been killed for sure, but he got away without so much as a scratch on him.

  “I knocked on a strange door and they did what they could for me, then took me to the Mater Hospital. There the nuns, bless ’em, hid me in the maternity ward. While I was lying in a bed half-conscious the place was surrounded by troops. The soldiers happened upon another badly wounded Republican they mistook for me. The poor fellow died while they were dragging him out of the hospital. They thought they were rid of Dan Breen.

  “Meanwhile Seán Treacy was trying to organize a rescue for me before the British realized their mistake. He was so worried about me that he forgot to look after himself. A gang of Auxiliaries and G-men caught him and shot him dead in the street.” Dan Breen’s tough bulldog features softened, melted with grief. “He was the best friend any man ever had, Henry. The best friend.”

  The seventeenth of October saw the death of the Cork hunger striker Michael FitzGerald.

  Members of Sinn Féin in Bandon awoke to find red crosses painted on the doors of their houses. That same night the Essex Regiment was turned loose in the town. Later a military lorry laden with the dead and dying went careening into Cork City, followed by soldiers who set about wrecking everything they could. The Harrington brothers sent Henry a long, detailed list of casualties and damages, to be published together with similar lists from Tuam and Mallow and a score of other towns.

  ON October twenty-fifth hunger striker Joseph Murphy died in Cork Jail. A more famous Republican preceded him by hours. Terence MacSwiney had died at 5:40 A.M. in Brixton Prison after seventy-four days without nourishment.

  Henry was in the Bulletin office when the word came through. The peripatetic newsletter had moved yet again. Thanks to the late-night efforts of the office boy and two of Collins’ men, the paper was now being printed and prepared for mailing on the second floor of number 11 Molesworth Street.

  Frank Gallagher appeared in the doorway. “Terry’s gone,” was all he said. He was white-faced and looked very fragile. Gallagher had a special horror of hunger strikes.

  “I never really thought they’d let it go that far,” said Anna Fitzsimons. Her voice was shaking.

  “I never really thought it would go any other way,” Henry replied. He folded his arms on his desk and put his head down on them.

  HENRY was thankful for his work. Addressing the grief of others gave him a legitimate outlet for his own grief; the intensely personal loss he could not express. He wrote: “Terence MacSwiney has now joined the heroes of Easter Week, standing shoulder to shoulder with them in sacrifice. To Mrs. MacSwiney and little Máire we offer the consolation of knowing that the Irish nation shares their loss. The name they enshrine in their hearts shall be forever enshrined in ours.”

  Terence MacSwiney had fought to stay alive as long as possible to draw attention to his cause, and in this he had succeeded. Foreign correspondents had flocked to cover the story. It was carried as a major news item in Rome and Paris and New York. The world had watched his protracted martyrdom with increasing dismay, and when at last he died, international condemnation of British policy was scathing.

/>   In an attempt to shift the blame, Winston Churchill said, “It was during the silly season the lord mayor of Cork announced his determination to starve himself to death. He did not want to die, and the government did not want him to die; but MacSwiney had many friends in Ireland who wished him to die.”5

  Although she was opposed to her husband’s hunger strike, Muriel MacSwiney had traveled to Brixton and remained there for most of his ordeal. But neither she nor his brothers and sisters were allowed to be with him at the end. Nor was his body immediately released. The authorities were alarmed by the ever-increasing crowds outside the prison.

  Cables of protest were pouring into London.

  Richard Mulcahy sent a military honor guard to escort the body back to Ireland. Upon arrival in England they were arrested. As the coffin was transported through London on its way to the port at Holyhead, thousands of ordinary English men and women lined the streets in respectful silence.

  MacSwiney’s family had arranged to take the body to Dublin for a large funeral procession, but they were prevented by force. When the coffin reached Holyhead it was shipped straight to Cork, where it was dumped on the quays like abandoned cargo, covered by an old tarpaulin.

  Terence MacSwiney was buried in Cork City on the thirty-first of October. A day of national mourning was proclaimed by the Dáil.

  At the request of Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, the remaining nine hunger strikers in Cork gave up their protest.

  On the first day of November eighteen-year-old Kevin Barry was hanged in Mountjoy Prison. An immense crowd gathered outside the prison before dawn, praying and pleading for mercy for the young man. To no avail.

  In the House of Commons J. H. Thomas read aloud an affidavit from Kevin Barry, giving full details of the extensive torture he had undergone in an effort to get him to identify those who had carried out the shootings in Church Street. Barry went to the gallows without ever revealing their names.6