Barry’s whole story has been dismissed as a fabrication, though it remains unclear why he would want to invent it. He never saw any need to justify the extermination of the police in the first tender, and in one later study which he endorsed he is recorded as telling his men before the fight, ‘See to it that these terrorists die and are broken!’244 Others have equally vigorously defended it – among other things, by declaring that the 1921 report was a British forgery. This cannot be proved or disproved, since the original copy has not survived. The British army believed it to be genuine – to use a fake report as part of an analysis of the operating methods of their opponents would have made no sense – though it may well have come to them from the police. Some of its details, such as the provision of 100 rounds per man, do sound more like a regular military than Volunteer level. But we may wonder how forgers could have known some of the other details, such as the division of sections, and the death of Pat Deasy. Yet again, it is not clear that merely failing to mention the false surrender – as several of the Bureau of Military History witnesses did – should be taken as implying that it did not happen. As always, there can be inconsistencies even among genuine testimonies, and these events are unlikely ever to be precisely reconstructed. The most systematic attempt so far made to weigh all the evidence and interpretations of the fighting runs to over thirty pages, and finds no clear way out of the tangle.245
Barry was a man who had a point to prove; as an ex-soldier he was going to hit a glass ceiling in the Volunteer command structure unless he could – as he did – demonstrate a wholly exceptional decisiveness and ruthlessness in taking the fight to the British. On his own account, he set up the operation in a way that seems to have been designed to maximize the risk run by the attackers. The attacking force was posted very close to the road, and Barry made a point of stressing that there was no line of retreat – ‘there was no plan for retirement until the column marched away victoriously.’ (The first report likewise dismissed the possibility of retreat, but presented this as a topographical fact rather than a deliberate decision.) His decision to lead the attack from the front – stepping out into the road himself to slow down the leading tender – broke more than one elementary rule of military command, limiting his ability to direct the fighting and making it impossible for him to communicate with his reserve force. One military analyst has called this ‘foolish and careless’, and condemned the idea of deliberately making retreat impossible as ‘downright foolhardy’ and ‘recklessly irresponsible’.246
‘A MORE DEFINITELY MILITARY CHARACTER’
In late September 1920 the RIC Office issued a circular responding to the ‘many reports of alleged acts of reprisal by police and soldiers’ that had appeared in the press. While protesting that these press accounts were ‘generally thoroughly misleading’ – often misrepresenting acts of justifiable self-defence as reprisals – it admitted that ‘there are cases in which unjustifiable action has undoubtedly been taken.’ The order ‘repeated and emphasised’ that ‘reprisals will ruin the discipline of the Force and cannot be countenanced by those in authority’. But the circular’s wording was hortatory rather than mandatory. ‘The great provocation under which men suffer who see their comrades and friends foully murdered is fully recognised, but the police are urged to maintain, in spite of this provocation, that self-control that has characterised the Force in the past. By so doing they will earn the respect and admiration of the majority of their fellow countrymen.’ The destruction of buildings and institutions would ‘impoverish the country and increase want and disorder’, so negating the fundamental police duty to ‘restore and maintain order’. In line with all the pronouncements of the police authorities, this order ended by reasserting that ‘the effective use of weapons when threatened or attacked’ was legitimate self-defence, and that the duty of the police was to ‘hunt down murderers by every means in their power’. In this they would be ‘fully supported and protected in the discharge of their duties by every means available’.247 When the order was translated by the Weekly Summary for the benefit of ordinary constables, the insistence that ‘reprisals … are bad for the discipline of the force’ and ‘bad for Ireland’ was balanced with the assertion that ‘reprisals do not happen wholly by accident. They are the result of the brutal, cowardly murder of police officers.’ To stop reprisals, ‘stop murdering policemen.’248
For the British authorities, the fundamental contradiction in their understanding of the Irish problem was becoming more awkward. It may well be that a majority of the policy community still believed that the Republic was a product of terror rather than consent. The RIC naturally led the way in this. ‘Much of the moral and material support lent to Sinn Féin is due to fear,’ it argued in November, ‘and with the growth of the realisation that the Government is beginning to get a grip of the situation there are indications of a return to sanity and revulsion against Sinn Féin on the part of the more responsible persons.’ In some places – such as Galway – ‘matters are well in hand and the murder gang is on the run.’ Indeed, in Limerick ‘we are now able to have a dance organised by “Black and Tans” as they are called. These have been most successful and show a good spirit returning.’249 Just as naturally, Liberals and moderate nationalists stressed the malign effects of reprisals. Edwin Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, told his Cabinet colleagues at the same time, ‘I feel a growing conviction that even if the murder gang in Ireland can be destroyed by this process – which I doubt – the younger generation is being educated in murderous thought.’250
There was no reprisal after Kilmichael, but on 1 December Montagu’s colleagues finally bowed to what now seemed inevitable: because ‘the recent outrage near Cork … partook of a more definitely military character than its predecessors,’ martial law would be declared. ‘Greenwood inferred that he had always been in favour of it,’ the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Henry Wilson, contemptuously noted, ‘and so did Winston, their only doubt being whether we had enough troops! What amazing liars.’ Wilson himself thought that with martial-law powers, fewer troops would in fact be needed, but his vision of martial law was not quite the same as that of the politicians (‘frocks’ in his argot). Mark Sturgis, with his usual clear-sightedness, noted in his diary that the soldiers expected ‘to have full control of everything in two two’s’; their watchword was ‘No more damn civilians’. The Prime Minister’s idea, by contrast, was ‘to have Martial Law in the distant provinces, a cloud on the horizon, leaving the seat of Government, Dublin, free for them as wants to negotiate’. But this, he could see, was ‘tricky work’ – not least because the army simply ‘have not grasped’ the idea.251
Leaving Dublin free of martial law certainly made no sense to the soldiers. Even as the proclamation of martial law in his name was being finally drafted, Lord French was spluttering that it would be ‘folly’ to exclude the capital from the proclaimed area. For ten days General Sir Hugh Jeudwine, deputing as C-in-C while Macready was on leave in the south of France, had fought tooth and nail to persuade Greenwood that martial law would work only if it embraced the whole country. Twice he thought he had convinced the Chief Secretary, only to find him once again ‘affecting surprise’ at the very idea.252 The eventual proclamation of martial law on 11 December was restricted to four south-western counties (Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Tipperary). When four further counties (Clare, Waterford, Kilkenny and Wexford) were added in the first week of 1921, this was merely to make the Martial Law Area (MLA) fit the area of General Strickland’s 6th Division. Though French once again insisted on the ‘vital importance’ of including the major ports, especially Dublin, the capital remained outside. Moreover, the army had early warning that even within the MLA its power would be limited: crucially, the police would not come under military control. Macready angrily warned that ‘Strickland will have to watch the police very carefully’ – his RIC Divisional Commissioner, Brigadier Prescott Decie, would ‘certainly … think that martial law means that he can
kill anybody he sees walking along the road whose appearance may be distasteful to him’.253 This bitter black humour showed how bad relations between the army and police were becoming. In fact, the Cabinet worried enough about this to count it a reason for considering negotiations with Sinn Féin.
The first fruit of martial law was a reprisal on a scale beyond anything yet seen, putting the whole coercive policy under a baleful spotlight. On 11 December 1920 an ADRIC patrol was ambushed in Cork, barely 200 yards from Victoria barracks: that evening a group of the newly arrived K Company went into the city centre and set fire to a large section of the main shopping street, as well as the City Hall and Carnegie Library several blocks away across the river. No fewer than three inquiries followed in quick succession. The second, by General Strickland himself, confirmed the view of the first that the responsibility lay with the local Auxiliary police, but added a criticism of the ‘higher authority who ordered a unit in so raw a state’ to such a dangerous area. The government had promised to publish the ‘Strickland report’, but this open criticism of Tudor changed its mind. The suppression of the report became a serious publicity own-goal. Tudor for his part held his own inquiry, which shifted the blame away from the police.254 On 14 December he issued a circular order deprecating reprisals by burning – at which, the veteran General Sir Hubert Gough (a leader of the 1914 Curragh mutiny) wrote, ‘we may well stand aghast.’ ‘It is not an order, it is merely an “appeal”.’255
Stung by the Daily Telegraph’s suggestion that ‘the chiefs of the terrorist organisation’ were quite capable of staging the arson attack to stop ‘any talk of peace’ by moderate Sinn Feiners, the Irish Labour party protested that ‘the Government which stoops to such methods is not only a bully but a sneak.’ When the government refused a judicial inquiry, the ILP/TUC held its own, assembling more than seventy eyewitness accounts for its report, Who Burnt Cork City?256 As it happened, the British Labour party’s Commission to Ireland was taking evidence in the south-east at the time of the burnings, and the report it presented in London on 29 December was deeply subversive of the official line. The commissioners soberly observed that ‘in every part of Ireland that we visited we were impressed by the atmosphere of terrorism which prevailed.’ But this was not, as the government maintained, the result of republican violence. British reprisals, ‘a cruel and inhuman policy’, were ‘a confession of bankruptcy of statesmanship and the desperate expedient of men lost to all sense of humanity’. Echoing the Volunteers’ own language, they argued that the republican army could not be beaten because ‘it lives and fights dispersed; it is everywhere all the time and nowhere at any given moment.’ Only negotiation could end the conflict.257
Under the pressure of these events the machinery of government was audibly creaking. Three days after ‘the burning of Cork city’, Auxiliary Cadet Harte shot a young man and an old priest by the road near Dunmanway in southern Cork. Lloyd George furiously called for Harte to be tried by drumhead court and hanged on the spot, but Macready insisted on a proper trial, at which Harte was found insane. Reflecting that the killer in one of the worst excesses of the 1916 rebellion, the shooting of Francis Sheehy Skeffington, had also been found insane, Sturgis raged that if Harte was mad those who let him ‘loose on the world … armed to the teeth should take his place in the dock’.258 In the Commons, Joe Devlin bitterly denounced government policy: ‘you have fanned the flames of hatred … you have gone on from bad to worse.’ The Archbishop of Tuam warned Churchill that even in ‘peaceful’ districts like Galway, ‘the auxiliary Police are exercising terror & torture unchecked, & still the spirit of Sinn Fein is as strong as ever.’259
Part Three
WAR AND PEACE – TRIALS OF THE COUNTER-STATE: 1921
With the declaration of martial law, Britain’s Irish policy was balanced on a fine edge, teetering between repression and concession. Martial law represented the legal extreme of repressive policy – the last throw of the political dice. Conciliation, pushed into the wings since the summer surge, gingerly returned to centre stage when the Government of Ireland Act at last reached the statute book on 23 December 1920. For the ten months of its halting passage through parliament, the ‘partition act’ had evoked very little nationalist enthusiasm, but in spite of that it had stoked Ulster unionist fears of betrayal – with deadly consequences. Now Britain faced a real political reckoning. The elections to the two Irish parliaments would be a showdown in which the offer of limited devolution would be tested against the republican claim to independence, and the effectiveness of the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act and martial law measured against the strength of republican armed resistance.
Martial law was restricted to the south-west to keep Dublin open for those, in Sturgis’s jokey phrase, ‘as wants to negotiate’. A few on both sides seem to have wanted to. They found a new intermediary in Patrick Joseph Clune, Archbishop of Perth, a man with some experience of the war – he had been visiting his native Clare at the time of the Rineen ambush and the reprisals that followed it, and his nephew had died in Dublin Castle along with McKee and Clancy on Bloody Sunday. Shortly after the Kilmichael ambush he was enlisted by Joe Devlin as a go-between, and spent most of December moving between Dublin and London, talking to Griffith in prison, and twice to the Prime Minister, who certified him as ‘thoroughly loyal’.1 He seems to have drafted agreed truce terms that included immunity for Collins and Mulcahy.
Lloyd George was clearly interested in the idea of a truce, but he was equally adamant that the Volunteers must surrender their arms to get one. The permanently optimistic Chief Secretary, Greenwood, told him that Clune’s intervention should be read as a sign that the republican ‘cause and organisation is breaking up’; they needed to keep up the pressure. Griffith, who had been arrested on 27 November – some have suggested to make it easier for negotiators to talk to him, though this had never been a problem – was clearly ready to look on the bright side, thinking that Lloyd George ‘wants peace but is afraid of his Militarists’. Collins, who had succeeded him as acting president (though Griffith may, odd as it appears, first have offered the post to both Brugha and Stack), seems to have been more sceptical, seeing the move as an attempt to wrongfoot them. Certainly Clune was never able to shift Lloyd George on the arms-surrender issue. Neither side was yet really under enough pressure from events or its own public opinion to compromise its objectives. More ‘Peace Balloons’, as Mark Sturgis called them, would float up and burst in the coming days, and the fact that others went on appearing suggested that ‘there must be a very real anxiety to settle.’ But the episode threw a shadow of distrust, as he discovered months later – Sinn Feiners remained convinced that Clune ‘went to London with terms in his pocket and was led on and then turned down’; they had been ‘tricked and sold’.
Negotiation was still not the British government’s preferred path. Instead it chose, in effect, to fix a date by which military repression should have pacified Ireland enough to make it possible to hold ‘free’ elections to the new parliaments – elections whose result would not be dictated by republican intimidation. Unfortunately for itself, the army was persuaded to set that date. On 29 December the Prime Minister raised the question of a temporary truce (a month or two) with Macready, Anderson, Tudor and the divisional commanders. All seem to have been taken aback. Although Henry Wilson fumed that Macready was ‘not nearly strong enough against … so fatuous and fatal a policy’, they stood firm. To fend off the proposal, Macready promised that the ‘terror could be broken’ if martial law was extended across the whole country. Strickland rather recklessly went further, promising that in any case there would be ‘definite and decisive results in four months’ time’. The elections were accordingly set for May 1921.
‘IF IT IS WAR WE MUST HAVE A VIRTUAL DICTATOR’
To achieve ‘definite and decisive results’, the British army could now deploy fifty-one battalions of infantry (twenty of them in Strickland’s division and twelve in Dublin District) – a
substantial force, though hardly overwhelming even if the units had been at full strength. In fact most would struggle to muster half their nominal strength – 400 men; most of the troops were raw recruits, young men whose ‘fine drawn’ physique, as Macready complained, was stretched to the limit by incessant guard duty, little sleep and patrolling under constant threat of ambush. These pressures made normal training impossible. Persistent shortages of key equipment, especially lorries and armoured vehicles, were aggravated by obsolescence and unreliability.2 But more serious than these problems was the army’s painfully slow adaptation to the military environment created by the republican campaign. Contemptuous of their opponents, many officers still did not take their challenge seriously. Intelligence, the service on which any realistic prospect of locating or confronting the Volunteers depended, remained marginal, consigned to junior officers who would often be posted away just as they were developing the local knowledge and contacts needed. Like most regular armies, the British wanted to believe that success would be achieved by technology and large-scale operations.
But the soldiers’ key weapon, they hoped, was martial law. They expected many things from it. Maybe the least definite (and most seductive) was its ‘moral effect’. It was indeed a menacing concept, reawakening memories in Ireland of the 1916 regime of General Maxwell – even though, ironically, Maxwell had not been permitted to exercise what he saw as martial-law powers. Many people were apprehensive. According to General Strickland’s divisional staff, it was ‘a noticeable fact that during the first few weeks of Martial Law, more dumps of arms and ammunition were discovered than at any other time’ – a direct result of a quickened flow of information from the public. But this flow seems to have dried up again later. Once the shock effect of proclamation had worn off, what real powers did it give?
The Republic- The Fight for Irish Independence Page 30