When his travels took Henry behind Free State lines, he frequently observed photographers making a pictorial record of well-equipped, confident troops. Often the shots were artificially composed to show Free State soldiers vanquishing an unseen enemy. “On whose orders?” Henry asked a cameraman.
“Desmond FitzGerald,” was the reply. “He’s a blinkin’ genius at propaganda.”
Once, in a sunlit field, Henry saw a photographer recording a company of captured Free State soldiers playing a game of hurley while their Republican guard stood watch, cheering the good plays.1
For some the sunlight was blotted out forever. On the last day of July, government soldiers came upon two Republicans in the Grand Hotel in Skerries, in North County Dublin. One was the quartermaster for the Eastern Command of the IRA—Harry Boland.
A scuffle ensued during which Boland was shot in the stomach. He was taken to Saint Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, where a letter was found in his pocket from Michael Collins. The letter expressed profound disappointment at Boland’s loyalty to de Valera. “Harry—it has come to this! Of all the things it has come to this. It is in my power to arrest you and destroy you. This I cannot do.”2
Boland’s sister visited him in hospital. When she asked who shot him, Boland replied, “The only thing I’ll say is that it was a friend of my own who was in Lewes Prison with me. I’ll never tell the name and don’t try to find out. I forgive him and want no reprisals. I want to be buried in the grave in Glasnevin with Cathal Brugha.”3
Two days later he was dead.
Michael Collins remarked, “I’d send a wreath, but I suppose they’d return it torn up.”4
HENRY Mooney wrote, “Depending on one’s viewpoint there are several names for the war which ended with the truce of 1921: the Tan War, the Anglo-Irish War, the War of Independence. But there is only one name for what is happening now: the War of Brothers.”
THE fighting grew increasingly desperate in the south. Almost every town and village was the subject of an intense struggle. The commander in chief of the Free State forces was driving himself and all those about him at a fever pitch. Only a proportion of the government troops were former Volunteers; the majority were raw recruits who had to be transformed overnight into an efficient fighting force. With his energies concentrated on the war, Collins was forced to leave more and more of the business of running the country in the hands of others. He resigned as chairman of the Provisional Government and W. T. Cosgrave was appointed acting chairman.
In his early forties, Cosgrave was a refined-looking man with a sharply cut nose. He had once possessed a flowing mane of golden hair and a matching mustache, but these had been shaved off by British prison guards after Easter Week, 1916. They grew back but were never as luxuriant again. W. T. was considered a good choice as chairman; the sort of man who would value principle over power. With him in charge, Collins could devote himself to strategy.
The war must be won so that the peace could be built along with the new state.
Ships from Dublin, heavily laden with munitions, traveled around the coast to land government troops in Cork and Kerry. They included members of the Dublin Guard, which in turn included former members of Michael Collins’ assassination squad. Hardened men trained to unquestioning violence at the command of their leader.
The government’s plan was to encircle the IRA in its stronghold and force a final victory. It was more likely that the conflict would become a grim war of attrition in the rural wilderness.
Henry reached Cork City on the tenth of August, only hours ahead of the Free State forces. The IRA was tearing up roads and railways and blowing up bridges to slow their progress. However, the Free State Army was launching a three-pronged attack supported by reinforcements landed on the coast, and the outcome was inevitable. Michael Collins, Cork man to the soul, was determined to claim the southern capital for the government.
Before the fighting for the city began, Henry called in to the Cork Examiner. To his relief, Frank Gallagher gave him a friendly welcome and a typist to transcribe his most recent notes. “Don’t suppose I could use your telephone?” Henry ventured. “I would like to get a call through to Dublin.”
“So would we all,” Gallagher replied. “Give it a try.” But after a frustrating half hour listening to crackling wires, dead lines, and operators who pretended not to hear him, Henry gave up.
“I’ll wager the Free Staters can make a phone call if they want to,” said Gallagher resentfully. “Say, would you like to go for a jar while it’s still quiet?”
As the two men were getting their hats, they heard the roar of engines in the street.
They ran outside.
A large convoy of lorries and motorcars, bristling with guns, had set out from IRA headquarters at Union Quay. Republicans rode on top as well as inside. Henry was astonished to observe none other than Erskine Childers crouched on a running board. He looked very small and slight in his mackintosh; his face was shrunk nearly to the bone. Before Henry could call to his old friend the car roared past and was gone.
Henry ran into the street and finally succeeded in flagging down a lorry. “Where the hell are you going?”
The front-seat passenger, a rugged mountainy man with forty years of living ground into the seams of his face, was crying. “We been ordered to evacuate. They tell us we don’t stand a chance here.”
His words confirmed what Henry already knew. Yet hearing them, and seeing the defeat and bafflement, the rage and grief contorting the faces of the departing men, was like a blow to the belly. For one irrational moment he wanted to shout at them, “Stand and fight! You mustn’t give up!”
The driver of the lorry leaned across his passenger to say, “I’d step back if I were you. We’ve our ordnance crammed into these things, piled in any old way just to get it out of the city. This lorry’s loaded with bombs, and I can’t vouch for their stability.”
Henry took a hasty step backward.
The vehicle pulled away.
An hour later, Collins” men strode in to the city unchallenged. “Local boy makes good,” Frank Gallagher observed to Henry Mooney. “I suspect you’ll be able to get that telephone call through in another hour or so.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Stay here with the paper, I suppose, like the captain of a sinking ship.”
Collins himself did not enter Cork City with the Free State Army. The commander in chief was conducting a tour of inspection through the southwest and was currently believed to be in Tralee, but was expected within a day or two.
He did not arrive. When Henry finally got his telephone call through to Dublin, he was told by a distraught Kathleen MacKenna, “Oh, Henry, Arthur’s dead!”
“What are you saying? Arthur who?”
“Arthur Griffith. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage this morning. We’ve sent word to Mick Collins to come back for the funeral.”
EAMON de Valera, who was being hunted by government forces, did not dare appear in public at Arthur Griffith’s funeral.
Tributes were pouring in. The one Henry chose for the articles he would send abroad came from Seán MacEoin, who said, “Griffith sacrificed his life—a life of great ability—for the Irish people. He was the poorest man in Ireland when he died.”5 Henry added, “Though no one would know it to look at him these past months, when he was worn down by overwork and constant strain, Arthur Griffith was only fifty.”
Michael Collins, holding his face in rocklike impassivity, marched at the head of the funeral procession. He was not yet thirty-two.
“He looks ten years older than he did the last time I saw him,” Henry told Louise afterward. “Black hearses, black horses, and black hats—this isn’t the Dublin I fell in love with years ago.”
“What about the woman you fell in love with? Would you not stop here a few days before you go back down the country, and see her?”
“I am going to remain here for several days,” he replied. “I need some time to poli
sh my articles for abroad before I send them.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
Henry pretended not to hear.
THE war had not touched Herbert Place. As he stood across the street from Ella’s house, Henry wistfully observed the serene residential neighborhood. Leafy trees, blooming gardens. A nanny pushing an elaborate Victorian pram with a long fringe to protect its small occupant from the sun.
It might almost have been last year: the year of hope, 1921.
He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and turned away. Walking, solitary, through Dublin. Back towards the north side.
HENRY hoped for a personal interview with Michael Collins about Arthur Griffith. As usual, Collins was making room in his crowded schedule to meet journalists and to see prominent visitors from abroad. The Provisional Government must be seen to be functioning. In addition he was trying to balance the competing agendas of military and civic government, and the stresses between north and south. The date of his wedding to Kitty Kiernan had been set as August twenty-second. That was now postponed.
Before Henry had a chance to talk with him, on the twentieth of August Michael Collins left the city. “The commander in chief has gone south to resume his tour of inspection,” Henry was told when he called at Collins’ office. “He’s taken Emmet Dalton with him. They’ll be in Cork City all day tomorrow.”
Unsatisfied with the answer, Henry next paid a call on Liam Tobin. “Was it not reckless of Mick to go to Cork right now? The county’s still anti-Treaty almost to a man. Liam Lynch has some two thousand men in the area.”
Tobin replied, “The Big Fellow’s not worried. You know what he said to me? ‘Och, no one would shoot me in me own county.’ ”
“Not on purpose, perhaps, but…Why is he really down there? Surely he has plenty of staff officers for inspection tours.”
“Well…you can’t print this, Henry, until he gives the word…but he’s hoping to meet with de Valera and arrange a truce. He told me he’s going to try to bring the boys around.6 He’s persuaded a number of prominent Cork men to support the initiative. Mick’s not as reckless as he seems.”
Henry briefly closed his eyes. “Thank God.”
He returned to number 16 to work on other articles, but found himself writing a letter to Ursula instead.
“It’s only a matter of time until the war is over,” he told her. “Collins’ people believe it will be a few weeks at the most. If you have any way to get in touch with your father, please ask him to contact me. I shall be at Louise Kearney’s for another week or so, possibly longer.” He stared at the paper for a while, then added, “If you don’t hear from Ned, write to me anyway. Just to write me.”
Three days later, as Henry was coming downstairs for his tea, the first of Louise’s lodgers returned from his day’s work. The man had a special edition of the Irish Times in his hand and a stunned expression on his face.
Henry took the paper from his nerveless fingers. With a sense of disbelief he read: “General Michael Collins, commander in chief of the National Army, was the victim of an ambush by Irregulars at Béal na mBláth, between Macroom and Bandon, on last night (Tuesday). At the end of the engagement, which lasted close upon an hour, the commander in chief was fatally wounded by a single shot to the head. The killer or killers have not yet been captured.”
Both our friends and our enemies think we’ll never die, but we will.
OVER seven hundred Republican prisoners were being held in Kilmainham Jail. When they learned of Collins’ death they went down on their knees to say the rosary for the repose of his soul.
Richard Mulcahy issued an order to the Free State Army. “Stand by your posts. Bend bravely and undaunted to your work. Let no cruel act of reprisal blemish your bright honor. Every dark hour that Michael Collins met since 1916 seemed but to steel that bright strength of his and temper his gay bravery. You are left each inheritors of that strength.”7
Messages of tribute poured in from far beyond the shores of Ireland. Not only his friends, but his enemies, saluted him. Lord Birkenhead, who had taken part in the Treaty negotiations, said, “He was a complex and a very remarkable personality; daring, resourceful, volatile and merry. I have never doubted that both he and Mr. Griffith, having once given their word, would sacrifice life itself in order to carry out their promise.”8
In a letter to Collins’ sister, the cynical and witty Dublin-born playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Tear up your mourning and hang up your brightest colors in his honor, and let us all praise God that he had not to die in a snuffy bed of a trumpery cough, weakened by age, and saddened by the disappointments that would have attended his work had he lived.”
HENRY tried to write an obituary, but the memory of Mick’s living face kept getting in the way. What in God’s name can I say about him? Who could sum him up in a paragraph, or even a volume? Mick was a law unto himself: brilliant, boisterous, exuberant, maudlin…occasionally immature. It’s easy to forget how young he was.
He cold-bloodedly sent men out to kill, but what else does a commander do in a war? He was also a warm, loving man, totally devoted to his family and his people. A hero to suit the need of the time. If he had lived, he might have matured into a great statesman. But how does one come to terms with the contradictions in his character?
Don’t we all have them? What did Little Business say? “I’m lots of different people. So are you.”
So are all of us, Little Business, Henry thought, putting aside his pencil. So was Michael Collins.
COLLINS’ funeral was the largest in living memory. In Queenstown Harbor a crowd watched in a numbed silence as his body was loaded on board ship to be transported from Cork to Dublin, it not being deemed safe to send it by land. Candles were burning in every window. When the ship pulled out of the harbor, the mournful sound of a solo trumpet floated out across the water.
In Dublin mourners converged on the capital from the four corners of Ireland. A Requiem Mass was celebrated in the Pro-Cathedral; then the coffin was placed on a gun carriage for a procession which wound through the city before making its sorrowful way to Glasnevin Cemetery.
The crowds were so dense at times it was impossible to move at all. Men wept as openly as women.
Henry waited for the cortège in Merrion Street, outside Government Buildings. As the procession was approaching, a man standing beside him muttered under his breath, “It’s a trick, you know.”
“Sorry?”
“A trick to confuse the British. The Big Fellow’s pulled some good ones in his time, but this takes the biscuit. Wait till the minister for finance gets the bill for this funeral! But it’ll be worth every farthing. Just when the Brits think he’s dead and take their eye off ’im, Collins’ll sneak up on their flank and…and…” The man could not sustain the dream. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he blew his nose with a great honk.
A woman in the crowd turned to glare. Beneath the brim of her fashionable black hat, Henry recognized Ava Mansell. They exchanged nods; then she came over to him. “What a sad day this is, Henry.”
“Indeed it is.” He restrained himself from looking past her, searching for another face. “I trust you’re not here alone?”
“Oh no, Edwin and Madge are with me.” She gave a vague wave. “They’re over there, engaging a motorcab for the drive to Glasnevin.”
“Ella didn’t come? Is she ill?” he asked anxiously.
“Nothing physical. She’s just not going out much these days. You broke her heart, you know.”
“I what?”
“It’s a wonder I’m speaking to you at all, Henry Mooney, after you hurt her so terribly.”
“What are you talking about, woman?”
“Don’t play the innocent with me—I’m sure you know quite well. We returned from the theatre one night to find her in tears and Edwin in a perfect fury. Neither of them would say what had happened, but we got the impression you’d abandoned her.”
Henry was deep
ly shocked. “Abandoned! My God. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
People in the crowd around them were openly eavesdropping. The Irish loved gossip even more than funerals.
Taking Ava by the elbow, Henry steered her back from the street to a sheltering doorway. There he described his encounter with Edwin, concluding, “I love Ella deeply. I’ve never wanted anything but her happiness, Ava. You must believe that.”
“What I believe isn’t important. The fact remains, she’s miserable. It’s making me miserable too, because she’s dearer to me than my own wretched relatives.”
Her choice of adjectives surprised Henry. “Wretched?”
Ava’s lips curled with contempt. “To my family I was never more than a commodity on the marriage market. But the Mansells love the person I am, warts and all, bless them.”
Glimpsing the vulnerable woman behind the beautiful mask, Henry felt a sudden, unexpected kinship. “My mother despises me,” he admitted. Ava lifted her eyebrows. He went on, “I’ve been a disappointment to Mam since the day I put on long trousers. And if my brothers and sisters speak to me at all, it’s to complain. Ella is so lucky to have the family she does! That’s what it comes down to—not politics or money or religion. I love her too much to destroy her relationship with her family. Rather than forcing her to choose between us, I simply left. Maybe a person has to be without something to know how much it’s worth,” he added.
Ava studied his face intently. “Does Ella know about your family?”
He shook his head. “I’m a very private person.”
“So you left without explaining any of this to her?”
“I did what I thought was right, Ava.”
“What you thought was right. Men!” She rolled her eyes heavenward. “You took it on yourself to act on her behalf. If that’s not typical of the arrogant, pig-headed attitude that has subjugated women for so long!” Ava sounded disgusted. “Explain something else, Henry. Ella said she saw you in the street one day, fighting with Wallace Congreve. She thought you would come for her then. But you turned and went the other way.”
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