Wounds: A Memoir of War and Love. Fergal Keane

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СКАЧАТЬ Auxies had taken the hats off men who failed to bare their heads in respect as the cortège passed.

      He had been killed down the country, in Kerry, but he came from County Galway in the west. His RIC comrades followed in slow procession beside and behind. The constables of the Royal Irish Constabulary were marching out of history and towards oblivion behind a coffin draped in the Union flag: colours that would vanish from these streets in less than two years. But the marching men could not foresee the end of empire in Ireland. The British imperium stretched from the Pitcairn Islands across the Pacific and the Bay of Bengal, across the Hindu Kush to Delhi, across the Indian Ocean to Arabia and Palestine, through the Strait of Gibraltar until it reached this embattled western frontier, these streets of Dublin, capital of Britain’s first colony. The funeral marchers knew of the unravelling in the wider world. Some would have had brothers and cousins still fighting the small wars of peace that erupted after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

      The Great War was over. But the Bolsheviks were fighting to save their revolution. Churchill had dispatched an expeditionary force to Russia to bolster anti-Communist ‘White’ forces, in the vicious civil war. As a child I remember seeing a photograph of a soldier, Sergeant Jamesie Harris of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, crouching in the snow. He was the father of my mother’s best friend, Breda, and went to ‘fight back the Red menace and collect the shillin’ a day’.1 The Great War irrevocably changed Breda’s father. The man in the picture has a wanderlust, perpetually seeking a camaraderie impossible to find in the tenements of Charlemont Street where as many as nine people lived in a single room. More practically the Dublin of escalating guerrilla war was a risky place for an ex-serviceman, unless he was going to offer his services to the Republicans. As long as Jamesie Harris’s fellow soldiers were being shot at and grenaded by the IRA, marching across the snows of Russia seemed much the better option.

      At the Paris peace talks in 1919 the Irish delegation had been ignored, as had Vietnam, represented by Ho Chi Minh, and T. E. Lawrence with the Arabian commission, who quickly discovered the worth of promises made during war. The treaties of Versailles and Sèvres merely rearranged imperialism. Out with the Germans, Austro-Hungarians and Ottomans and in with the Italians, the Japanese and, greatest and youngest of the looming giants, the United States, a behemoth that oscillated between isolationism and the logic of its expansive energy. The Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, was being devoured by Britain, France and Greece until Turkish nationalism, in the form of Kemal Atatürk, halted their advance. Great armies clashed on the plains of Asia Minor and in the coastal cities of the Aegean. Smoke swirled over the port of Smyrna in 1922 while thousands of Greeks and other Christian minorities were butchered by the Turks.

      Versailles did not deliver freedom to the small nation of Ireland. But the future IRA leader Michael Collins surely never expected it would. With his ingrained pragmatism he would have understood the crude realities of power in the post-war world. But they did not daunt him and the other leaders of the Republican movement. In Ireland by January 1921, thousands of regular troops were supporting sixteen thousand regular police and paramilitary forces in the war against the IRA.

      Until these past twelve months in Ireland the British had managed to suppress colonial revolt. In the late nineteenth century, countless tribes went down before the machine guns and cannon of imperial armies: Zulus, Xhosa, Ashanti, Matabele, Shona, the Mahdi and his Dervishes at Omdurman. The Boers gave them a fright but ultimately succumbed. The Great War expanded the machinery of terror available to the industrial powers. The Iraqi tribes were crushed with air power and Maxim guns, their villages burned while high explosive shredded and carbonised those bearing arms and those who did not.

      In India the viceroy was in the midst of plans to welcome the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII, on a visit during which nationalist agitation was expected. Mahatma Gandhi asked angrily: ‘Do the British think we are children? Do they think that parades for the prince will make us forget atrocities in the Punjab or the perpetual delay in granting us Home Rule?’2 In the House of Lords, Lord Sydenham was worried about the rising militancy of religiously inspired warriors, young men who had forgotten the thrashing handed out to their fathers when they rebelled in 1897 on the North-West Frontier. ‘It is always the young tribesmen who are easily accessible to the Mullahs, and they can at any time be led either to attack their neighbours or make raids into British India.’3 Across Africa, nationalist movements were organising and challenging white rule: the African National Congress was formed in 1912, four years before the Easter Rising.

      The new nationalists in Africa, Asia and the Middle East were ruthlessly suppressed. In Ireland alone, from 1920 onwards, the anti-colonial struggle was escalating towards a decisive showdown. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry Wilson, worried that ‘if we have lost Ireland we have lost the Empire’.4 The funeral of District Inspector O’Sullivan was the latest way station in the decline of British power in Ireland.

      The funeral procession passed the ruins of Dublin’s General Post Office. How distant the Easter week of 1916 must have seemed now to the marching policemen and soldiers. The war of symbolic martyrdom was over. The poets and dreamers were dead. New leaders imbued with ruthless purpose had emerged to challenge the empire. Michael Collins and his ‘Squad’ of assassins tracked down police constables, spies and informers. There would be no more heroic failures. This was to be a revolution of steel not poetry. In north Kerry, my grandmother and her brother joined with farmers’ children from across Ireland. They fought alongside the hard men of the inner cities and idealistic college students from the middle classes. They were part of a rebel army which would never offer itself up to such easy destruction as had the men and women of 1916. The GPO veteran Collins wrote that the new force would not be ‘like the standing armies of even the small independent countries of Europe [but] riflemen scouts … capable of acting as a self-contained unit’.5 The concept of the IRA Flying Column was born.

      Collins was helping to develop a new form of warfare: assassination and ambush, fast-moving squads of guerrillas – the so-called Flying Columns – would move across the countryside, being sustained by the people. The Boers had tried this with some success, moving across the expanses of the South African veld, before the British burned their farms, rounded up their women and children and stuck them in concentration camps. Such a repressive policy could not be so easily implemented in Ireland, just a few hours’ sailing from mainland Britain, and with a watchful press and parliamentary oversight. His approach would pre-date Mao Zedong’s seminal On Guerrilla Warfare by seventeen years. It would be studied closely by Ho Chi Minh later, as he prepared to liberate Vietnam from French rule, and by many other insurgents, from Algeria to the Far East. But Collins’s ambitions for the fall of empire in Ireland did not appear imminently realisable at the start of the conflict.

      The British government tried to meet terror with terror. It was brutal enough to push the Irish people deeper into the embrace of the guerrillas. Addressing the Oxford Union, W. B. Yeats condemned ‘the horrible things done to ordinary law-abiding people by these maddened men’.6 He was referring to the paramilitary police who had been recruited to augment the exhausted police. Over ten thousand served in Ireland. Many were veterans of the trenches of France and Flanders.

In Dublin, Nelson still stood on his pillar gazing south across the Liffey; behind him in the Phoenix Park the Chief Secretary for Ireland was still firmly ensconced in the Vice-Regal Lodge. The manager of the Shelbourne Hotel had closed his doors, in deference to the reduced custom occasioned by war, but he could see better days ahead, a return to the normal order, and he ensured that the ‘grande old dame’ of St Stephen’s Green was regularly patrolled by the last remaining porter, upon whom ‘devolved the ghostly duty of an inspection tour in the unnatural day-and-night darkness, in the silence piled up floor upon floor’.СКАЧАТЬ