1921
Page 28
The liveryman nodded vigorously. “None o’ the lads’ll so much as spit in her path. When she rides out, I’ll run alongside, and if she falls I’ll catch her. I swear it on me sainted mother!”
Henry smiled to himself. So that’s what having power feels like.
A piebald cob was brought out for Precious: white with large irregular blotches of black across its body, and sturdy legs. “The tinkers call these broken-colored horses,” the liveryman explained, “but this was no tinker’s horse. This is a right fine animal, this is, and we have a proper lady’s sidesaddle too.”
A flicker of contempt crossed the girl’s face. “I shan’t require a sidesaddle, thank you. I’m not a proper lady.”
The liveryman glanced toward Henry, who bit his lip to keep from laughing. “Better do it her way,” he said. “She knows what she wants.”
A regular saddle was produced and the stirrup leathers shortened to accommodate the little girl’s legs. The liveryman led the cob to a mounting block. “Step up on this,” he instructed, “then put your right leg over the horse…There you are now. Like a reg’lar centenary.”
Precious sat quietly for a few moments, absorbing the wonder of the living, breathing animal beneath her. Looking down at the people around her. Looking out across Dublin from a height.
Until that moment she had been little. On a horse, she was little no longer.
THAT same morning Michael Collins’ squad, augmented by members of the Dublin Brigade, approached seven different private houses and the Gresham Hotel. Each group was provided with a list of names and physical descriptions. They waited until the clocks chimed nine, then struck simultaneously across the city. Housemaids responding to a knock on the door were ordered at gunpoint to identify the bedrooms of the British agents, most of whom were still asleep. At the Gresham the head porter was forced to give the room numbers of two more.
When one member of the squad found his intended victim not at home, he vented his frustration on the man’s mistress by spanking her with her lover’s sword scabbard.2
According to the official government statement, fourteen British secret agents were shot dead that morning. The actual number killed may have been as high as nineteen or twenty. A witness described one of the murder scenes as looking like an abattoir.
As news seeped out, there was panic in the city. Hundreds of military and civil-service personnel besieged Dublin Castle, convinced they would be the next targets. One British secret agent broke under the strain and shot himself.
BY the time Henry and Precious left Smithfield, newsboys were already shouting in the streets. BLOODY SUNDAY! screamed the banner headline in a special edition of the Times. Henry immediately bought the paper and read it aghast. Now he understood why Collins wanted him to print the decoded document on the following day.
Precious stood watching his face while he read, then silently extended her hand for the paper.
“You don’t want to read this, Little Business.”
“I’ll worry more if I don’t know.”
What sort of childhood is this for anybody? He handed her the newspaper. Precious ran her eyes swiftly over the story. Her expression did not change, but Henry saw her brace her shoulders. Then she folded the paper and put it under her arm. “We had best go straight home, Uncle Henry. The streets won’t be safe, will they?”
“I’m afraid not, Little Business.”
Looking up at him, she forced her special, radiant smile. “But it was a wonderful morning.”
IN Dublin’s Croke Park, the Mecca of Gaelic football, there was a match that Sunday afternoon between Dublin and Tipperary. Eight thousand men, women, and children gathered to watch the traditional rivals battle it out. Many of them stood on Hill Sixteen at the far end of the playing field, so named because its terraces had been constructed from rubble left after the 1916 Rising. Somewhere underneath was even the wreck of the De Dion Bouton motorcar that had belonged to The O’Rahilly, and been used as a barricade.
The match had hardly begun when a number of military lorries drove up and surrounded the grounds. Tans and Auxiliaries leaped from the trucks. While an officer was telling the gatekeepers they had come to search for known Sinn Féiners, his men set up machine guns on the canal bridge and indiscriminately opened fire on the crowd. A Tipperary player, Michael Hogan, and eleven spectators were killed outright. Fifty-seven suffered serious bullet wounds, and hundreds more were injured in the stampede that followed.
Dublin was convulsed with horror.
THAT night was an anxious one at number 16. No one knew where Ned was. Henry and Louise tried half a dozen times to get Precious to go to bed, but finally they gave up. She fell asleep on the black horsehair couch in the parlor—with her riding gloves on. Only then was Henry able to carry her upstairs and tuck her into bed.
Ned arrived shortly after midnight. His face was haggard and he seemed dazed. Henry was waiting for him in the parlor. “What in God’s name have you been up to?” he burst out angrily.
“You heard, I suppose? About the Cairo Gang?” Ned slumped into the nearest chair. “I went to Mass,” he said dreamily, rubbing his thumb along the arm of the chair, back and forth, back and forth. “Sure a lot of us did. We prayed for their souls.”
“Were you one of the men who shot them?”
Back and forth. Eyes lowered, watching his thumb. “I told you, Mick wouldn’t let me join the squad.”
“It wasn’t just the squad and you know it. According to the newspapers there were members of the Dublin Brigade as well. Most of them got away, but there were a couple of running gun battles, and at least one man was captured.”
“Mick will get him out. He’s good at that.” Ned leaned his head against the back of the chair. “I’m so tired,” he sighed. His eyelids drifted down until the long lashes brushed his cheeks. He reminded Henry of a weary boy. Of Precious falling asleep on the couch.
“What about Croke Park, Ned?” Henry persisted. “This morning’s work brought all hell down on a lot of innocent people.”
“That wasn’t meant to happen. Mick tried to get the game cancelled, but the GAA said the crowd had been gathering since morning and there was nothing that could be done.”3
“He knew there would be reprisals when he gave the order to exterminate the Cairo Gang. Damn it, Ned, were you one of the killers?”
“The British are the killers.” Ned opened his eyes; they met Henry’s for the first time. Green eyes, cold as the sea, pitiless as fate. “They killed my Síle.” He stood up abruptly. “I’m going to bed.”
ON Monday the Bulletin printed the stolen Castle document as justification for the murders of the Cairo Gang.
Even Dublin Castle dared not try to publicly justify what had happened in Croke Park. However, the British cabinet was informed that “there is no doubt that some of the most desperate criminals in Ireland were among the spectators.”4
Three prisoners who had been held in Dublin Castle since Saturday night—two Republicans and a civilian arrested by mistake—were beaten by their captors, then bayoneted and finally shot. It was claimed that they had tried to escape by threatening their guards with hand grenades, the presumption being that they had smuggled these grenades into the Castle and kept them on their persons for twenty hours without being discovered. A highly suspicious series of photographs was released to the press, showing three men sitting with their heads bowed so their faces could not be recognized, then leaping toward the window while their guards crouched behind overturned furniture. When the bodies were released for burial, their faces were found to have been badly battered post-mortem.
Michael Collins insisted the two Republicans be buried in full uniform, and attended their funeral Mass himself, risking identification and arrest. Afterward he helped carry the coffins. A photographer for the Evening Herald managed to snap a picture of him that appeared in the first edition. The squad called on the newspaper immediately afterward and the picture was deleted from later editions.
On the twenty-seventh the IRA took the war to the enemy.
In Liverpool a Republican squad set fire to fifteen cotton warehouses and timber yards. Warnings were given in advance and no one was injured, but the damage to property was extensive. The alarmed British government responded by erecting barriers across the approaches to Downing Street, and the public galleries were closed in both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Scotland Yard was called in to protect politicians.
In Dublin, Arthur Griffith was arrested. He joined Eoin MacNeill in Kilmainham Jail—which had been called the Dismal House of Little Ease when first used as a prison in the twelfth century.5
For months Griffith had been working behind the scenes to encourage a truce between the British government and the Irish. Following Bloody Sunday he had remarked in Young Ireland that violence was at best only one aspect of national policy. A politician walking a very careful line, he was trying not to upset either side before a truce could be negotiated. But his comments were enough to draw the wrath of Dublin Castle. As far as the Castle was concerned, Griffith was Sinn Féin and Sinn Féin was the enemy.
Henry wrote in an article for the London Daily News, “By arresting that great pacifist, Arthur Griffith, Dublin Castle has gone a long way toward silencing the moderate voices in republicanism that urge constitutional political solutions. Is this the British intention? In a plan worthy of Machiavelli himself, does Lloyd George mean to reduce us to such extremes that any method of suppression is justified?”
To his surprise, they printed it.
Two days after Griffith’s arrest Eoin MacNeill was unconditionally released.
From prison, Arthur Griffith appointed Michael Collins to serve as acting president of the Dáil in the continuing absence of de Valera.
IN West Cork the Tans had been conducting a terror campaign since summer. They would come roaring into a village, order everyone—men, women, and children—into the street, search and abuse them for hours, sometimes stripping the men naked, sometimes pistol-whipping them. When a very elderly priest objected to their shooting some of his parishioners for sport as they worked in their fields, the Tans shot him too.
ON the twenty-eighth of November Tom Barry’s flying column ambushed an Auxiliary patrol at Kilmichael, on the Macroom road. Eighteen Auxiliaries were killed. Three Republicans also died, an unusually high number for a guerrilla operation.
On November the thirtieth Eoin MacNeill was rearrested—still without warrant or charge.
Dublin Castle was seizing and releasing individuals in a dizzying round meant to frighten and intimidate. They did not seem to care who they took, or why. Some men would never leave prison alive.
A young tenement girl the same age as Precious was shot dead by British soldiers in the streets of Dublin as she scavenged for food.
GENERAL headquarters of the Irish Republican Army was a movable feast. Henry found the chief of staff working in the carriage house behind his home in the suburban village of Rathmines. On the two and a half acres that comprised the property, Mulcahy’s wife had begun creating a small farm. Her butter-and-egg money would be a welcome addition to her husband’s income. In the young state, even the head of the army had to count his shillings and pence.
Inside the carriage house maps were tacked on every wall. Richard Mulcahy sat behind a table, poring over papers. In an article for Collier’s Weekly in America, Henry had written, “General Richard Mulcahy is a quiet, gracious, unassuming man, simple in his tastes. He does not drink and attends Mass at seven every morning. It is unusual to describe a military man as unassertive, but that is the case with him. He is the opposite in temperament from Michael Collins, who served as director of intelligence on his staff.”
Mulcahy glanced up with the abstracted air of a man who must call his concentration back from far places: one swift blink, a sudden and sharp refocus. Taking off his reading spectacles, he said, “Dia dhuit,* Henry,” in impeccable Irish. “Welcome to GHQ. Did Mick send you?”
“I’m here on my own. I have a personal matter to discuss with you.”
“Go on into the house and have Min give you a cup of tea.” Mulcahy issued the invitation as a courteous command; he was a cool, practical man who dealt with each situation as it arose in precisely the same manner. “I’ll be with you in a few minutes,” he added.
“Min” Mulcahy—the former Mary Josephine Ryan—was as ardent a Republican as her husband. She and her sister Phyllis had been the last two to see Sean MacDermott alive, aside from the firing squad. While he waited for Mulcahy, Henry persuaded her to retell a story she must have told many times before.
“We waited for hours and hours at Kilmainham, and were finally shown to Sean’s cell at three o’clock in the morning.6 It was gritty dark hole with a bucket in the corner and a plank bed. Do you take sugar, Mr. Mooney?…Really—that much? Anyway, there were two soldiers there all the time, watching us. They had a lantern, because there were no lights in that part of Kilmainham. You can’t imagine how dark and grim it was.”
Henry said soberly, “I think I can.”
“Seán could tell how miserable we were. He wanted to make things easier for us, so he chatted about people we knew and made little jokes as if we were sitting around a table at Bewley’s, having our coffee. Then he tried to give us some keepsakes for various other girlfriends of his. We all loved him, you know. He borrowed a penknife from one of the soldiers and scratched his name on the few coins he had left and some buttons he cut off his clothes. I can see him to this day, Henry—that beautiful head like some old-time Celtic prince, bent over his work.” Her eyes filled with tears. “The last thing we heard him say as they took us out was ‘God Save Ireland.’ Half an hour later they shot him.”
Dick Mulcahy entered the room. Thirty-four years old, a slender man of average height, he carried himself with the bearing of a professional soldier. His was a long, narrow face, with sharply cut features and deep-set eyes. An air of imperturbable calm: the sort of man who could hold an army together under fire.
“You shouldn’t keep talking about that, Min,” he said to his wife. “It just upsets you.” He turned to Henry. “We’re expecting our first, you see, and she needs to take care of herself.”
“That’s what I want to talk to you about. Taking care of someone.”
“Sorry?”
“My friend Ned Halloran. Dublin Brigade.”
Mulcahy nodded. “One of the best. What about him?”
“Let me tell you some things about him you may not know. Both of Ned’s parents went down with the Titanic; he himself narrowly escaped. He’s still suffering from a severe head wound he received Easter Week. And now his wife’s been murdered. I don’t think he can cope anymore; he’s on the verge of a complete breakdown.”
“Soldiers have come back from the trenches with something they’re calling shell shock,” said Mulcahy. “Dreadful. There’s simply a limit to how much any man can take. It differs with individuals, though.”
“I can assure you Ned has reached his limit. He’s behaving like a man who doesn’t care what happens to him, and in that state he’s bound to be caught by the British. You know what they did to poor young Kevin Barry. Prolonged, systematic torture. It would go much worse with Ned Halloran, who really does know secrets they’d give anything to get. The point is, Ned has a motherless young daughter who needs him sane and alive. So I’m asking for your help while there’s still time.”
Min Mulcahy stretched out an imploring hand to her husband. “Oh, do help them. You heard—he has a baby, Dick!”
Henry did not contradict her.
Mulcahy smiled tenderly at his young wife, a smile that revealed another and very different man. “All right, Min, all right. Don’t fret now.” He put one arm around her and hugged her to him. They had been married only a year. “Tell me what you have in mind, Henry.”
TWO da
ys later Ned was summoned to GHQ. The next morning over breakfast he asked Precious, “How would you like to live down the country?”
Louise Kearney put down her fork. “What’s this about?”
“I’m being transferred out of Dublin effective immediately. Orders from the top. The IRA in Clare are running their own show a bit too much for General Mulcahy’s liking, and he wants someone from headquarters down there to keep him informed. He selected me personally because I know the area. It means a promotion; I’m to be a communications officer.”
Precious looked stricken. “What about Uncle Henry and Auntie Louise?”
“We’ll be living with your uncle Frank and my aunt Norah instead, and my two little sisters, Lucy and Eileen. They’re only a few years older than you, so it will be like having sisters yourself. If all goes well, we’ll be with them in time for Christmas.”
For the first time since Síle died, Henry noticed a touch of color in Ned’s cheeks. I did the right thing, he thought with relief. He smiled encouragingly at Precious. “You’ll be having a country Christmas, Little Business. Just imagine.”
“But I don’t want to leave you.”
“Oh, you’ll see quite a lot of me. This hip of mine’s healed and I’m ready to report the action from the front lines again.”
“There are plenty of front lines right here in Dublin,” Ned commented. “All the action a man could…” His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Say, Henry, did you have anything to do with sending me out of the city?”
“Me? I don’t have any influence at GHQ—I’m not even in the army. I’m not a fighter, remember?”
AS Henry helped Louise clear the table she whispered to him, “He’ll never forgive you if he finds out. He’ll accuse you of trying to run his life instead of trying to save it again. That’s getting to be a habit with you, isn’t it?”