WHAT CIVIL WAR IN ULSTER WOULD MEIN.
STRANGE as it may seem, there are plenty of indications in the speeches of the Liberal leaders, and still more in articles in the Liberal newspapers, that the Liberal Party have not as yet in the least recognized what civil war in Ulster would mean. No doubt the Cabinet have aban- doned the idea that the Ulster people will quietly yield when they are told that submission to the will of the local majority is a principle too precious to be applied to the Irish Protestants of the north, and that they must be content to be ruled by the will of the local majority in the south and west of Ireland. In former days the Southerners argued that "Liberty's the kind of thing that don't agree with niggers." So now in effect we are told that autonomy's the kind of thing that don't agree with Irish Protestants. We must do the Government the justice to say that they are beginning to understand that the Ulster Protestants do not like to be told this. They know now that the Ulstermen mean business, and that if the Bill passes without exclusion they will have, as Sir Edward Grey says, to meet violence with violence. That is a step gained, but we feel sure that ordinary Liberals do not in the least appreciate the nature of the violence which will have to be used by them. They think that a whiff of grape shot and the killing of some two or three hundred men in the streets of Belfast is all that will be necessary. In fact, the party Liberal envisages a kind of rather strenuous Tonypandy or a repetition of the Dublin riots, but with Church of England clergymen and Presbyterian ministers instead of trade union officials as leaders.
We can assure them that they are mistaken. The problem they will have to solve next June, if the Bill is carried through without the exclusion of North-East Ulster, will be something wholly different. What they will have to face is the putting down of a hundred thousand partially drilled but on the whole well organized men led by capable leaders in whom they believe—men armed with a very efficient rifle and possessed of an ample store of ammunition. The ammunition, it should be noted, is not gathered in one magazine, which can be seized and destroyed by a coup de main, but scattered and concealed throughout the country. The Ulstermen have not put all their eggs into one basket. Their principle is one man one rifle, and each man the guardian and storekeeper of his own rifle.
At first people may be inclined to say that this arming and organizing of the Ulstermen will make their repression all the easier. It will incline them, we shall be told, to come into the open and try a pitched battle, in which they are sure to be hopelessly beaten. We are not in the secrets of the Ulstermen, but we know enough of them to feel sure they have grasped the truth that they are quite unable, even if they had the wish, to stand up to the British Army and beat it in a pitched battle. They may be a passionate people, but they are also a very cautious, and in some ways slow and dour people, and they recognize the value of those qualities. They will be quite content, in spite of their organization, to play a Fabian game in the north-east, to spread them- selves throughout their mountains and bogs and by their lake sides, and let the Government attempt the work of disarming the villagers, or chasing them up and down the country while the more mobile bands ambush the Government supplies, cut the railways, and render difficult the feeding and movements of the troops. The Ulstermen are prepared to keep on at a delaying campaign of this kind for two or three months. They will not like it, no doubt. How fully they recognize what they are in for is shown by their willingness to accept exclusion and the experiment of Home Rule in the rest of Ireland rather than have civil war. That they will endure all the horrors of civil war if exclusion is not granted to them rather than submit to a Dublin Parliament we have no sort of doubt. And here let us point out that it is idle for the Government to say that they can be as Fabian as the Ulstermen, and that they have not the slightest desire to attack them. They will be obliged by the force of circumstances to take the aggressive rather than the peaceful line. As we have said again and again, though we do not in the least approve of or desire to encourage such action, there is no doubt that the moment the Bill passes there will be in all the Protestant centres a movement to drive away the Catholics. They will not be massacred, but do what the leaders will, the Protestant workmen and the Protestant majorities in the towns and populous areas will not consent to live with a Catholic and Nationalist population beside them. Fear and panic will have their usual effect. They make men cruel and ruthless. Protestants will argue that they cannot feel safe, when they take the field in their regiments, if their homes are left at the mercy of the Catholic minority. That minority will accordingly be expelled or, at any rate, an attempt will be made to expel them as traitors within the citadel. The Catholic minority will naturally resist and appeal for protection from the Govern- ment, and so the fight will begin. Next will come reprisals in the south and west, and still more in the places on the Ulster border, where the Catholics are in a majority, and where they will very naturally say that they have a right to mete out to the Protestants the treatment meted out by them to the Catholics. They will endeavour, in fine, to drive out the Protestants. These movements on the border will again be met by raids of Protestants, and especially of the Protestant mounted corps, to protect their co-religionists.
The fact that the Ulster civil war will begin in this way will make it very difficult for the Government to do what is always wise in cases of civil trouble, i.e., to keep their forces concentrated. The appeals for protec- tion on the part of the Catholics and the natural desire of the Imperial Executive to prevent reprisals w ill pro- duce a demand for troops not only throughout the six Plantation counties, but in Donegal, Cavan, Monaghan, parts of Tyrone, and all along the southern borders of Ulster. The General will be overwhelmed with demands to send troops here, there, and everywhere, to prevent what will be called "massacres," and which, as blood becomes hotter, may almost deserve that description. "How utterly monstrous ! How abominably wicked of the Ulster people to plan such things ! " will doubtless be the comment of our Home Rule readers. We are not going to defend such deeds for a moment, but we know they would happen. That is why we are willing to sacrifice our Unionist principles in order to obtain exclusion as the one thing which will prevent civil war—assuming, as we recognize we must, that the Government are too much entangled in their pledges to Mr. Redmond to take the better course of a general election or a Referendum.
The certainty that this struggle will begin not in a mere Belfast street riot or in a neat general action, such as many Liberals seem to suppose, but in a thousand small collisions throughout the whole province of Ulster and its borders, will make war come in its fiercest and most terrible form. It will also make it come in a form that will have tremendous and far-reaching consequences for the Government, though apparently these consequences are at present quite invisible to them. The Government, we are sure, will want to do their coercion with the least possible amount of cruelty. They are humane men, and, quite apart from any other considerations, they will want not to shed any more of the blood of their countrymen than is absolutely necessary. But even if they were themselves without pity, they would know that a great effusion of blood might at any moment lead to a reaction which would be fatal to them as an Administra- tion. They will not then consent or be able to do what a Continental Power would do, and what in truth would be the kindest thing to do. They will not tell their generals to draw the first blood, and to be sure that a great deal of it is shed in the first few days in order to strike terror into the rebels. They will not give the order, Frappez fort et frappez vile. Instead of that they will try wherever possible to make so great a display of force that the rebels will be overawed, and be compelled either to evacuate the positions they may have taken up or else to surrender without a shot. They will, in effect, always want to confront one rebel with two soldiers. But if the Army is to be broken up into small bodies in order to give protection, and is to be widely scattered throughout North- East Ulster to save the Catholics, and spread broadcast on the borders to prevent the extinction of the Protestant minority, and, further, if this work is to be accomplished with the least possible amount of bloodshed, we are certain, whatever may be said now to the contrary by so-called experts, that two hundred thousand men will be required for the work. We tried dealing with the Boers on the cheap with forty thousand men, with the result that we had later to get together four hundred thousand men.
As this war will have to be a kid-glove war, at any rate at the beginning, we are certain that the Government will not be able to wage it with fewer than two hundred thousand men. Now this means that in addition to the troops already in Ireland they will have to send about a hundred and sixty thousand men, or the whole of the expeditionary force. This again means that the whole of the Reserve will have to be called out and kept out for at least three months. But consider the dislocation of trade caused thereby and the fury of the men at being recalled to the colours for such a purpose as forcing Dublin rule upon North-East Ulster ! Further, the calling out of the Reserve and the taking of the expeditionary force out of England and Scotland will oblige the Government, unless they are willing to run greater risks than we believe they are, to order the embodiment of the whole of the Territorial Force. But a pretty mess that would result in. That the Territorial Force would obey the order for embodiment willingly enough in the case of a foreign war, is beyond doubt, but the grumbling over embodiment in the case of civil war, even though the men would not be employed in Ireland, will be most for- midable.
Having got their two hundred thousand men and put them into the field in Ireland, do the Government recognize how quickly that force will become demoralized unless they are kept constantly springing at the throats of the rebels, that is, being constantly blooded ? If they leave the soldiers scattered about in the Ulster villages and small towns, it will be absolutely impossible to prevent them fraternizing with the men, and still more with the women, and hearing stories of Catholic outrages, very likely untrue, but nevertheless stories which will make the ordinary Protestant Scotsman and Englishman "see red" and soon render him useless for the work which he will be called upon to do. Louis Philippe found out too late the danger of keeping troops hanging about for political reasons instead of sending them straight at the enemy. In '48 the army, if it had been at once let loose at the Paris mob, would have gone for them, and there would possibly have been no abdication. They were kept inert for three or four days, and it was then found impossible to use them. They had not become Republicans in theory, but they found they could not shoot down on a Wednesday men with whom they had been chatting on the most familiar terms up till Tuesday night. A man will not consent to be a kindly, good-tempered, friendly soldier one day, and use a repeating rifle on his friends the next day with ruthless precision.
We shall say no more about the difficulties of employing English and Scottish Protestant troops against the Ulster Protestants—remember, the moment civil war begins it will be a religious war in essentials. The possibility of something in the nature of what would be technical mutiny among officers and troops is too horrible to discuss. Civil war is bad, but mutiny, however well- intentioned, is ten times worse. It is difficult even to describe the prospect without appearing to give encourage- ment where that is the last thing we wish to give. Unfor- tunately, however, all the facts seem to show that there will be a large number of officers who will find it impos- sible to reconcile the soldier's duty with what they con- ceive to be the citizen's duty. It is all very well for us to say, as we should say, that in that case the soldier's duty must come first. But what are we to reply if officers say that they cannot and will not be governed by abstract considerations, and that they will not give the order to fire on Ulstermen? And here it must not be supposed that unwillingness to shed the blood of their fellow subjects will only be found among violent Loyalist officers and men. We heard only the other day of an officer—and there must be plenty such—who in politics is a strong Home Ruler, but who yet feels an abhorrence to shedding the blood of Ulstermen. However, we will for the moment dismiss these considerations and assume—as assuredly we should like to assume—that there will be no resignations and no trouble with the Army, except that inevitable trouble of fraternisation of which we have spoken above. Even in that case the Government will have to put two hundred thousand men into Ulster, and in order to do so will have to call out the whole of the Reserve. They have not, apparently, imagination enough to understand this yet, and are still in the happy-go-lucky "whiff of grape shot" stage. They will find it out, how- ever, before next June. Let us hope that by then they will have come to the sensible conclusion that if they are to maintain their Irish policy it can only be done by the exclusion of the homogeneous Protestant and Loyalist Ulster.
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