`The Volunteers are Dead'

By ROBERT RHODES JAMES

'ruts has taken everyone by surprise.' With

I these words James Stephens opened his daily narrative of the Easter Rising in Dublin in April 1916.* It was an exact statement of fact. The general state of Ireland, apart from recruiting, and apart from the activities of the pro-German Sinn Fein minority, is thoroughly satisfactory,' the Director of Military Intelligence had reported only a fortnight before the Rising; 'The mass of the people are sound and loyal as regards the war, and the country is in a very prosperous state and very free from ordinary crime.' There were a quarter of a million Irishmen serving either in the British Army or associated forces such as the RIC. At the very most, 1,200 men answered the call to arms in the Easter Rising.

The Rising was something worse than a fiasco. The total dead and wounded in the five days' fighting on both sides was 1,351; there was substantial damage; over 100,000 people had to be given public relief. The Irish Catholic denounced the Rising as being 'as criminal as it was insane,' and 'traitorous and treacherous to our native land.' The BishOp of Ross described it as 'a senseless, meaningless debauch of blood.' Stephens noted that the Dublin women, of all classes, were 'actively and viciously hostile to the rising.' Among the majority of Dubliners, the general reaction seems to have been one of astonishment and detachment. In Stephens's words: None of these people were prepared for In- surrection. The thing had been sprung on them so suddenly that they were unable to take sides, and their feeling of detachment was still so complete that they would have betted on the business as if it had been a horse race or a dog fight.

Apathy and even indignation against the Volunteers were swept away by the fate of their leaders. The British government had hurriedly dispatched General Sir John Maxwell to Dublin. Maxwell was superficially self-confident but was in reality an uncertain, peppery little man in indifferent health who smoked cigarettes in- cessantly. He had just returned from Egypt, where he had had some experience of the problems of maintaining law and order in a country with a small but lively nationalist move- ment. His period in Egypt had lacked distinction —unless a constant war of attrition against Sir Ian Hamilton over the dispatch of units to Gallipoli can be held to have had some claim in this regard.

In Dublin, Maxwell used the well-tried methods. Martial law. The defeat of the insur- gents. The restoration of law and order. krbitrary internment for the rank and file. The execution of the ringleaders. It was the last step :hat was the fatal one, and that transformed the Rising into something infinitely more serious. The execution of Casement, and the deplorable circum- stances in which his reprieve was denied. com- pleted the metamorphosis. Yeats, who had written

of Ireland becoming 'a little greasy huxtering nation groping for halfpence in a greasy till,' now wrote that 'A terrible beauty is born.' What followed over the next eight years was indeed terrible, 'Death answering to Death like the clerks answering one another at the Mass,' as Lady Gregory wrote.

Stephens believed that 'If freedom is to come to Ireland—as I believe it is—then the Easter Insurrection was the only thing that could have happened.' The tragedy of it all was that Stephens was right. The Rising came as the decisive act at the end of a far longer story of struggle, defeat, disaster, and disillusion. The Irish were tired of waiting on the smiles of British politicians. For it was a revolt not only against the English, but against the 'con- stitutional' method 'of securing Home Rule. It was a return to an older tradition of protest. 4"They went forth always to the battle; and they always fell." Jndeed, the history of the Irish race is in that phrase,' Stephens wrote. But this time they did not fall in vain. As Daniel Corkery wrote: 'I saw that every extreme move- ment in Ireland leaves behind it a remnant of its broken army . . . great old hearts that pre- serve to the next generation, even to the second next, the spark of fire that they themselves had received in the self-same manner from those that long since were gone home into the silence.' General Maxwell and his firing parties converted that spark into an uncontrollable conflagration that died away only seven years later, and which still smoulders today.

But even when one examines the 1916 situation just before the Rising, it is not surprising that the event took everyone unawares. Historians can easily find causes for great events after they have happened. There was the centuries-old tradition of struggle against the English. There were the memories of the Great Hunger, of the Manchester Martyrs, of Captain Boycott, of Michelstown and 'Bloody Balfour.' But it had seemed, in spite of all provocations, that the dominant theme had become one of constitu- tional revolt. In Desmond Williams's admirable collection of essays,- Father F. X. Martin de- scribes the relative significance of the Gaelic League, Sinn Fein, the Gaelic Athletic Associa- tion, the revived Irish Republican Brotherhood, Arthur Griffith's United Irishman, and D. P. Moran's The Leader. The events of 1912-14 in Ulster had spurred on the political, semi-military, literary and dramatic nationalist movements in Southern Ireland. Yet, until Connolly and Pearse -if there was any person in the world less fitted to head an insurrection it was he,' as James Stephens wrote at the time—and their friends raised the standard of insurrection, all this had added up to surprisingly little. Sinn Fein hardly existed as a serious political force. Home Rule would come, one day, as a result of the labours of Redmond's party in Parliament. British and Irish troops fought together in France and Gallipoli. Even Pearse was writing in 1915 that

glorious in the history of Europe. . . . The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields,' to which Connolly publicly retorted that anyone who thought that was a 'blithering idiot.'t

But the leaders of the Rising had judged the old enemy right. They had counted on the insen- sitiveness of the English. Sir John Maxwell was a not unrepresentative figure. Behind him stood a weak Government and outraged British opinion. The Volunteers wanted martyrdom, and they got it. The next casualty was the old Irish Nationalist party, which was massacred in the 1918 elections. The relative significance of Red- mond's party and Sinn Fein was exactly reversed. Then came the struggle against the English, the introduction of the Black and Tans, Bloody Sunday, and all the manifold and awful paroxysms of The Troubles. As Yeats wrote:

Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery Can leave the mother, murdered at her door, The night can sweat with terror as before We pieced our thoughts into philosophy, And planned to bring the world under a rule, Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

And then came the Treaty, and the aftermath of the civil war. Between September 1922 and July 1923 some 665 Irishmen were killed, and over 3,000 wounded. But the figures alone tell little of the nature of the war. Most died in ambushes, before firing parties, in ugly skir- mishes, in prison yards, or in their own homes. Some, like Erskine Childers and Brugha, died dramatically. Most were denied even this con- solation. Even a dry narrative of events of the civil war is almost unbearable. One under- stands the bitterness of the veteran whom Mr Coogan interviewed, and who 'banged on the table and denounced De Valera. "Far greater wrong was done this country by De Valera than by Lloyd George," he said as he ushered me to the door. The strength of his emotional intensity overwhelmed me.'

Erskine Childers wrote, on the eve of his execution, that 'I die full of intense love for Ireland.' So did they all—the famous and the obscure, the remembered and the forgotten. But for what kind of Ireland, for what kind of future? Mr Coogan—whose book is refresh- ingly clear, cool, and sensible—asked Mrs Clarke, the widow of Thomas 1. Clarke, one of Max- well's victims, if she was satisfied with the way things had gone in Ireland since then: ' "No," she said, "1 am not. There isn't enough love. Not enough charity."' Dan Breen, on his retire- ment from the Dail last year, said that 'if they would only stop squabbling and get down to work, they would make a great country out of it.'

A young Englishman should feel deeply in- volved in the tragic history of Ireland. As Gladstone said in 1886, Ireland 'asks a blessed oblivion of the past, and in that oblivion our interest is deeper than even hers.' Now that Nelson no longer commands O'Connell Street and Casement is back in Glasnevin, cannot we pass a joint act of Oblivion? The Patriot Game is over. As Stephens wrote: 'The Volunteers are dead, and the call is now for volunteers.'

*THE INSURRECTION IN DUBLIN. By James Stephens. (Scepter Press, 6s.) t THE IRISH STRUGGLE. 1916-1926. Edited by Desmond Williams. (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 30s.) t. IRELAND SINCE THE RISING. By Timothy Patrick Coogan. (Pall Mall Press, 42s.)