TOPICS OF THE DAY,
THE DUBLIN REVOLT.
HERE are plenty of criticisms both true and obvious which can be made in regard to the Dublin revolt, but we mean to make none of them. And for this very good reason. To make them would at this moment contribute nothing towards our object of beating the Germans, and we have no use for either words or actions just now which fail to contribute to that object. We have got to win the war, and to win it we must concentrate our whole attention upon the military and naval situation in its capital aspects. Scoldings of the Govern- ment and of Mr. Birrell, however well deserved in the par- ticular instance, are immaterial—unless, of course, it can be shown that the Government are at the moment doing some- thing which they ought not to be doing or refraining from doing something which they ought to do. Of that, however, there seems to be no evidence. Public impatience that the thing has not been ended more quickly and severer punishment meted out to the insurgents is natural but hardly reasonable. People forget that if even a comparatively small body of armed men, say a thousand or less, secrete themselves in the streets, squares, and houses of a city, it is exceedingly difficult to turn them out or make prisoners of them unless you are prepared to knock the whole town to pieces by the use of heavy artillery. - We all remember what three men managed to accomplish at Sidney Street. From that it may be deduced what a thousand men can do in Dublin. It would be an unthinkable act of cruelty to bestow "artillery preparation" on those quarters of the city now occupied by the rebels. If such a thing were done, for every rebel killed ten or twelve peaceable inhabitants, men, women, and children, would have to share their fate. If a commanding officer has to deal with a situation such as that which has arisen at Dublin in a way which will do the minimum of harm to the city as a whole, he is obliged to act with the utmost care and deliberation. He is from the outset handicapped by the circumstance that the enemy have in their possession what are, in effect, several thousands of hostages, and that if he acts with vigour he must become in fact, though not in intention, the executioner of those hostages. This being so, the only way to overcome rebels who have possessed themselves of parts of a big town is to draw a cordon round them and either starve them out or else deal with them piecemeal, isolating a group of houses here and there and gradually restricting the rebel area. That, we presume, is what the General Officer Commanding in Ireland is now doing. The rebels are hiding behind the women and children. The French were faced with a somewhat similar situation during the Commune, and as a result of their efforts to put down the insurrection quickly half the great buildings in Paris were reduced to ashes. It is of course conceivable that this, after all, may have to be the fate of Dublin, but it is obvious that we must do everything we can to avoid it. That being the situation, it is clearly both foolish and unpatriotic to nag at the Government for not doing more, or to distract them by recriminations over past errors. At the moment the duty of the good citizen is to lend them full support, and not to give either the rebels or our enemies abroad the impression that they have thrown the nation and the Government into a state of confusion by what is, after all, a very petty event if judged by military standards.
Let any readers of these words who are at first inclined to doubt the wisdom of our view consider for a moment what was the object of the Germans in stirring up the Irish revolt, and what they would like to see accomplished thereby. Clearly that object was to cause the maximum of confusion and irritation here, and to distract our minds from the essential object of holding them and beating them on the Western Front. They knew, of course, that an insurrection in Ireland could not be an operation of any real military importance. They cal- culated, however, that by its means they might produce considerable political results. We have, indeed, very little doubt that Sir Roger Casement's raid and the Dublin insur- rection were set going at this particular moment because the Germans believed that they would synchronize with the political crisis at Westminster. Directly the crisis developed here the word was given to the Dublin plotters to go full steam ahead. The political and military strategists at Berlin have always calculated that if they could bring about the fall of the British Government a heavy blow would be dealt to the Alliance as a whole. Unquestionably the belief in the steadfast- ness of Britain owing to its immunity from attacks, either external or internal, has provided to a very great extent the bond which has held the Entente so closely together. Therefore 1 the Germans argue that if a position of instability, or apparent instability, an only he produced in this country, the Alliance must be badly shaken. Clearly, then, the moment to let loose the rebels in Dublin, where the ground had been carefully prepared by German money and German intrigue, would be when a political crisis had arisen in London.
We have little doubt that the attack upon Lowestoft and the Zeppelin raids of the past week were intended to have an auxiliary effect. It is also quite possible that there may have been thoughts of playing Germany's trump card of a military raid on our coasts. The Germans, unless their secret agents here are deceiving them very grossly, must have suffered a great deal of disappoint- ment in regard to the panic part of their programme. There has been no panic, or anything approaching it, and no sense of depression. Instead of the Cabinet being embarrassed in the Commons by the events of the past week, their path on the main issue of compulsion has been made very much easier. If things had gone quite smoothly, it is conceivable that a considerable section of the House of Commons might have argued that while things were going so well it was a great pity to stir up trouble by compulsion, and so forth. All such pleas have been got rid of by the events in Dublin and the naval raid. It is now clear that the Government will find no difficulty whatever in carrying their scheme of what we may call deferred compulsion. The Germans' main effort, therefore. has failed. Surely we shall not be so unwise as to let them succeed on the lesser counts, and enable them to say that at any rate they have weakened the Cabinet and prevented it from pushing the war on the Western Front with full vigour.
If we are to do what will most disappoint the Germans, and that surely is a thing worth doing, we must pick up the pieces in Ireland with as little fuss as possible, and show the minimum of annoyance and disturbance. As we have before pointed out in these columns, what daunts the Germans more than any- thing else is the thought of British stubbornness. The German people as a whole have an instinctive belief in, and dread of, that stubbornness. The Berlin Government probably have the same feeling, but they have been most anxious of late to pretend that British stubbornness has died out, and to induce the German people to believe that they need no longer dread it. The new Britain, it is alleged, is a feeble and neurotic nation, and has only to be well frightened to be induced to drop the war and make peace. We of course are not asking the British people to pose, or to pretend to be something which they are not. All we urge is that, as our stubbornness does exist, and is a great military and political asset, and further, as we were as a nation never more determined than at this moment to prosecute the war even if it costs us another two thousand millions and lasts another two or three years, we may just as well bring that fact home to our enemies and to our Allies. But we are not bringing it home if we indulge in angry recriminations and diatribes against the Government for having allowed Ireland to fester into insurrection. All talk of that kind must be kept till the war is over. At the present moment we must see things in their true proportions. The insurrection in Ireland, seen in its true proportions, is not a great military event.
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